The ProTego project has been completed in December 2021. In the last three years, a European consortium consisting of 9 partners has performed research and innovation activities with the aim to provide tools for risk identification and assessment and data protection to reduce cybersecurity risks in hospitals and care centers.
The objectives for ProTego are the following:
- Holistic approach to protect data from Electronic Health Records (EHR) against cyber risks generated by remote devices access, agnostic to health care IT infrastructure.
- Improve situational awareness during an attack.
- Protect sensitive data inside the hospital infrastructure and at the boundary between hospitals and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Internet of Things (IoT) domains.
- Cybersecurity solutions for Electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) protection released as integrated toolkit.
- Provision of an Educational framework: Methodologies and protocols for the correct usage of cyber-security tools, for attacks prevention and reaction to be used by health sector staff (IT and physicians) and patients.
- Validate in scenarios involving emerging technologies in health care informatics: IoT and BYOD.
To draw conclusions about the results of the project and assess impact a questionnaire was designed to gather the opinion of the IT staff in the hospitals that participated in all the testing performed. The responses to the questionnaire show the anticipated real perception of adoption by those that would be responsible of the resulting product of the project in the hospitals. This is the questionnaire and the answers received from the hospitals in a unified way:
To summarize the main aspects, the responders could identify features that are understood as useful to prevent or mitigate cyber risks in areas that have not been already covered in their hospitals, and even some of them are not provided by other products already in the market.
From a technical perspective, the versatility of the ProTego toolkit has been highlighted as a key factor to facilitate adoption, allowing to deploy it over different base infrastructures.
And from an organizational perspective, the modularity has been identified as useful, since the toolkit allows partial or progressive adoption, allowing each organization to find the right moment to introduce each component, as the organizational or corporate requirements could be met.
The positive results obtained in the final testing phase and the responses received from hospitals staff, demonstrate that the project has been a complete success.
This blog post was written for the ProTego project by Luis Carrascal (Inetum).
The PDF version of the blog post can be found here.
