Criticality and Consequences of Healthcare Industry

 Critical infrastructure is a system that ensures the continued growth of a nation’s economy and security, and any alteration to this system would be catastrophic to the nation (Rouse, 2020). Therefore, the healthcare industry serves as a critical infrastructure; hence, it is crucial to analyze its assets and assess their possible criticalities and consequences. The criticality of an asset indicates how essential the asset is in achieving an organization’s goals and the impact of the costs and time of replacement of the asset to the organization. In contrast, consequences indicate the impact that losing an asset would cause (Norman, 2016).

The most important healthcare asset is the clinical information system, which is interconnected (Mayol, Manzoni, & Jespersen, 2016). This system helps manage vital patient data to help provide patient-centered care. It also improves the patient’s outcome since it provides access to vital patient’s information and provides a platform for communication among various healthcare professionals. Through this, the healthcare personnel can make good decisions concerning their patients’ care, which proves that this system is critical for the healthcare industry’s functioning as critical infrastructure.

The loss of the clinical information system will mean that healthcare providers will have to manually collect patient information (Mayol, Manzoni, & Jespersen, 2016). This may turn to be very demanding in terms of time and cost since patient information is vast; hence a lot of time will be spent in the data collection. As a result, even the patient outcome will not be very encouraging, which makes the system very essential in the healthcare industry’s functioning.

 

 

 

References

Mayol, J., Manzoni, A., & Jespersen, P. (2016, December). Smart hospitals security and resilience for smart health service and infrastructure November 2016 smart hospital about ENISA. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Assets-critical-for-smart-hospitals_fig3_310844589

Norman, T. (2016). Risk analysis and security countermeasure selection. CRC Press.

Rouse, M. (2020). Critical Infrastructure. Retrieved from https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/critical-infrastructure