AUI and Accumen Partner to Increase Crisis Resilience to Natural and Manmade Disasters for Healthcare Sector

New programs will ensure that healthcare organizations are better prepared to handle security threats, and power, water/waste management or supply chain disruptions

AUI and Accumen, Inc. announced they are partnering to provide services to improve crisis resilience to manmade and natural disasters for the healthcare sector at a historically challenging time.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for an enhanced level of crisis resilience essential to avoid overwhelming hospitals and negatively impacting patient care. This new AUI/Accumen partnership is intended to address that need and to improve healthcare industry safeguards against cybersecurity threats.  

Underscoring the urgency of the situation, the Department of Homeland Security noted almost a 300% rise in ransomware attacks over the last year affecting small businesses in over half of the incidents,¹ while the HIPAA Journal announced more than 29 million healthcare records were breached in the last year alone.²  Further, natural and manmade disasters caused disruptions coast to coast as wildfires challenged West Coast energy and supply chains, extreme weather caused a historic Texas outage, and the Colonial Pipeline shutdown wreaked havoc on the East Coast.

“The U.S. healthcare system is vulnerable to all the operational disruptions that one reads about in the news, whether it be natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and extreme heat and cold, or manmade threats such as malware and ransomware, armed intruders, or explosive devices,” said Accumen CEO BG Porter. “Accumen is partnering with AUI to bring their expertise to our industry and increase the healthcare sector’s disaster preparedness and resilience. We want to take some of the pressure off healthcare professionals by keeping the lights on and the doors open and ensuring that needed medical equipment and supplies are available and on hand, letting them focus on what they do best – taking care of patients.” 

AUI will play a central role in providing cybersecurity and operational resilience measures in the partnership. “We are excited to partner with Accumen to provide operational resilience to critical infrastructure and help address this national challenge,” said AUI CEO, Dr. Adam Cohen.  

Additional information about Accumen/AUI’s Crisis Resilience for Healthcare program is available at https://accumen.com/crisis-resilience.

References

1. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dhs-secretary-warns-ransomware-attacks-rise-targets-include/story?id=77512872
2. https://www.hipaajournal.com/2020-healthcare-data-breach-report-us/

About AUI

AUI collaborates with the scientific community to plan, build, and operate cutting-edge facilities. We cultivate excellence, deliver value, enhance education, and engage the public. Our expertise focuses on continually improving research and development, user facilities, management and operations, technology incubation, and community engagement through workshop and conference planning. www.aui.edu

About Accumen Inc.

Accumen is a technology enabled organization that partners with hospital, health system, commercial laboratory, and payer clients, to provide strategic solutions and services that deliver sustainable performance improvements. Our offerings include lab and imaging transformation, consulting, supply chain optimization, lab outreach, 3D post-processing, patient blood management, test utilization, anemia management, and clinical data exchange. Accumen’s offerings enable our clients to achieve and exceed their cost, quality, and service targets, as well as deliver excellent patient care through evidence-based data and clinical decision support capabilities.

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Find out more at Accumen.com