Medical devices save countless lives, and increasingly functions such as data storage and wireless communication allow for individualized patient care and other advances. But after their recent study, an interdisciplinary team of medical researchers and computer scientists warn that federal regulators need to improve how they track security and privacy problems in medical devices. Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School and the University of Massachusetts Amherst analyzed reports from decades of U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) databases and found that established mechanisms for evaluating device safety may not be suitable for security and privacy problems. The researchers, members of the Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS), report results in the current issue of the PLoS ONE journal.
