In addition to paper and multimedia, healthcare environments have adopted electromagnetic recording media, ICT equipment, and IoT environments to handle medical information. This means that medical information systems and the healthcare institutions they pertain to have been exposed to a new threat landscape in the digital space. On March 10, 2023, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare announced partial amendments to the ‘Medical Care Act Enforcement Regulations’ which were mostly comprised of new regulations focused on enhancing cybersecurity. This ordinance went into effect on April 1, 2023, and will affect the healthcare industry greatly.
In this publication, TXOne takes a deep dive into Japan’s new guidelines, introducing them and explaining the objectives and overviews put forth by them. This is followed by a close examination of how these guidelines strengthen cybersecurity in healthcare institutions as well as a roadmap of how healthcare institutions can achieve compliance under these new mandates.
In the past, various cybersecurity guidelines had been put into place, to no avail—security issues persisted, mainly because of
- Increasing technical threats: Attacks from external malicious software have been on the rise and can lead to a cessation of healthcare functions.
- Massive data processing in short timeframes: The swiftness with which vast amounts of data is processed by medical information systems lends itself to security issues like misconfigurations, failures to log out, supply chain attacks or malfunctions.
The new regulations take these factors into consideration and explicitly demand that healthcare institutions address them with hardened network security measures. At the end of the day, cybersecurity isn’t just about defending against external threats; it’s also essential to ensure internal security and data integrity. Read more for greater details on the guidelines and how healthcare institutions can strengthen their cybersecurity.
