For U.S. healthcare systems, the core mission has always been clear: protect patients and deliver a high standard of care. However, as the industry undergoes a massive technological transformation, the definition of "safety" is changing. Achieving this mission now requires securing the cyber-physical systems (CPS) that make up the complex web of medical devices and internet-facing infrastructure.
Attackers aren’t looking for a challenge—they’re looking for leverage. As hospitals improve IT resilience and reduce the attack surface across an IT environment, threat actors are pivoting to clinical pressure points that primarily consist of the life-sustaining systems that deliver life-saving care. In these environments, any amount of downtime can create a life-or-death scenario. To navigate this landscape, healthcare leaders must move beyond fragmented security efforts toward a unified, resilient environment where people, processes, and technology come together to mitigate risk and protect patient care delivery.
There are four essential pillars to accomplishing this:
Protecting Patient Safety and Service Availability
The conversation around patient safety has reached a critical inflection point in 2026. There is now a sobering, industry-wide recognition: An electronic health record (EHR) has a paper backup, but infusion pumps, telemetry monitors, and ICU networks don’t. In a modern hospital, the digital and physical are one and the same; a vulnerability in a building management system (BMS) is no longer just a facilities issue—it is a clinical risk that can compromise the entire environment in the event of an incident.
Achieving this mission requires securing high-value workflows in the OR, imaging, and infusion to prevent the treatment delays that lead directly to patient harm. It requires unifying security across medical devices and facilities systems like HVAC and med-gas to maintain the sterile environments required for surgery. Most critically, it demands clinical alarm and signal integrity, ensuring that life-sustaining telemetry and alarm middleware remain connected to prevent undetected system failures and catastrophic patient harm that no amount of bedside skill can overcome.
The Business Impact
Beyond the threat to human life, failing to ensure the immediate availability of safety-critical systems can result in catastrophic reputational damage and the permanent erosion of community trust.
The Path Forward
Healthcare organizations must move toward a posture of clinical resilience, ensuring that life-sustaining systems have no single point of failure.
Maintaining Regulatory Compliance and Governance
There are few things that loom as large in healthcare as regulatory compliance. In addition to mandatory HIPAA compliance, there are a number of operational requirements that are no longer optional. From the 2026 HIPAA Security Rule mandates regarding 15-day critical patching to asset inventory and the HPH Cybersecurity Performance Goals, the bar for good cyber hygiene is rising.
Organizations are also facing stricter external oversight. Whether driven by federal SEC disclosure mandates for public entities or the adoption of NACD guidance for nonprofit board governance, the expectation for cyber-risk transparency is now a boardroom standard. From preparing for incident reporting to the pending 72-hour system restoration mandate within the HIPAA 2026 update, the pressure to provide defensible, dollar-based risk quantification is mounting.
The Business Impact
Failing an audit can lead to serious financial and safety-related consequences that include fines, reputational harm, and the potential harm that can come to patients should devices not be in compliance. In the EU it could mean failing to meet the de facto NIST CSF 2.0 underwriting benchmarks that insurers now use to justify skyrocketing premiums and restricted coverage.
The Path Forward
Healthcare organizations must operationalize compliance by automating asset inventory to provide the evidence of diligence required if a breach should occur, and aligning their security postures with HHS hygiene standards to ensure continuous, audit-ready governance.
Navigating the Evolving Threat Landscape
The attack surface in modern healthcare is expanding at an unprecedented rate. The rapid growth of connected care, including internet of things (IoT) devices and operational technology (OT), has introduced severe risks to patient safety. This is exacerbated by a vendor and supply chain reality where hospitals must manage thousands of third parties and remote access doors into their network.
Furthermore, healthcare systems are increasingly targeted by nation-state actors and sophisticated ransomware gangs aiming to cripple operational uptime, like in 2024’s Change Healthcare ransomware attack. Vendor and supply chain vulnerabilities, where unmanaged third-party risks and undiscovered devices silently compromise network integrity exacerbate the issue. Finally, the integration of AI is expanding the attack surface and introducing complex governance challenges.
The Business Impact
A targeted ransomware attack or a compromised third-party vendor can halt operations entirely, turning a digital vulnerability into a critical patient safety emergency and million-dollar operational freeze.
The Path Forward
Organizations must gain complete visibility across their connected care infrastructure to enable a precise response that isolates threats without disconnecting the systems that keep patients alive. This requires strict third-party risk management protocols, proactive mitigation strategies for undiscovered or unmanaged devices, and robust AI governance policies to secure operations against evolving, highly targeted attacks.
Cultivating Business Resilience
At its core, securing the healthcare mission requires business resilience. In 2026, this means moving beyond clinical uptime to a strategy that defends the organization’s financial viability and workforce sustainability against severe fiscal tightening.
Resilience starts with financial protection—defending margins against a reality where downtime due to a ransomware attack costs an average $1.9M daily. By using Claroty to automate the identification and prioritization of vulnerabilities, teams drive operational efficiency, addressing hiring freezes by eliminating the manual inventory and reconciliation tasks that currently consume biomedical labor.
Claroty xDome bridges the gap between security, IT, biomed, network, and facilities to achieve workforce resilience and operational governance. By providing a single source of truth for every connected asset, Claroty eliminates the undue labor of manual coordination and paper-based clinical workarounds that occur when systems aren't unified. Finally, xDome enables workforce sustainability protection by securing the specific cyber-physical safety systems—like nurse call-lights, duress buttons, and telemetry—that clinicians depend on to manage rising patient acuity. When these systems are hardened against disruption, it’s possible to reduce the churn tax of staff burnout that peaks when technical failures force nurses into the manual chaos of non-clinical work.
The Business Impact
Fragmented defenses lead to staffing chaos and the erosion of clinical workforces. A cyber incident that forces a nurse into manual charting isn't just a technical glitch. If it happens multiple times, it can turn into a retention crisis.
The Path Forward
Achieving resilience requires a shared source of truth that allows teams to do more with less while protecting the clinicians on the front lines. By automating asset discovery and risk prioritization, organizations can save approximately $250,000 per year in labor alone, allowing them to defend their financial margins and protect their workforce without compromising patient safety.
Taking the First Step on the Path Forward: A CPS Protection Program
The reality of 2026 is simple: Devices are connected. People and processes aren’t. To move from identifying vulnerabilities to actively securing the mission of care, healthcare organizations should adopt a structured CPS protection program that closes the operational silos between IT, clinical engineering, network, and facilities.
Define Governance
Establish clear ownership, cross-departmental RACI models, and a unified security language that bridges the gap between security, clinical, and management teams.
Establish Process
Develop standard operating procedures, continuous compliance and risk assessment cadences, and tailored incident response playbooks that prioritize clinical impact and recovery speed over mere data containment.
Operationalize Technology
Leverage a purpose-built platform that translates deep device visibility into the outcomes executives fund: patient safety, operational continuity, and revenue protection.
Securing the healthcare environment is no longer just an IT initiative—it is a clinical and business imperative. By adopting a unified strategy, your hospital can depend on care that continues, uninterrupted.
If these imperatives are driving your healthcare decisions, speak to an expert at Claroty today.
