TRIMEDX Develops New Cloud-Based Features to Boost Medical Device Cybersecurity

TRIMEDX has crafted a new strategy to help healthcare systems reduce medical device cybersecurity risks, bolster patient safety, and optimize medical equipment across all sites of care. 
 
The company’s new Reallocation Platform and a trio of medical device cybersecurity improvements further elevate how TRIMEDX partners with healthcare providers, which are faced with ongoing financial pressures, increased supply chain and labor expenses, the shifting of healthcare delivery to outpatient settings, and heightened cybersecurity risks.
  
“A health system’s clinical assets account for more than 25 percent of its capital expenditures,” said TRIMEDX CEO Henry Hummel. “This is a significant financial resource that can be optimized to help organizations meet their financial objectives without compromising patient care or safety.”
 
Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer LeAnne Hester stated, “We are committed to ongoing solution enhancements that provide objective information and recommendations to healthcare executives within IT, finance, and operations that inform decisions across their continuum of care and support the implementation of their strategies.”
 
The Reallocation Platform is an integrated online system that leverages TRIMEDX’s proprietary RUDR Score to identify assets available for “reallocation” to another site within a healthcare system. Upon a healthcare system’s approval, medical devices with low utilization rates in their current sites are listed on the Reallocation Platform, where administrators at other sites within the same healthcare system can view, browse, and search for equipment that is needed at their facility. Leaders can compare devices on a host of attributes, such as make, model, manufacturer, age, and reliability, to find the equipment that best suits their needs.
 
“The Reallocation Platform helps healthcare systems avoid unnecessary capital expenses associated with buying equipment for other sites of care that systemwide they don’t need,” said Dave Klumpe, TRIMEDX’s president of clinical asset management. “Plus, adding more equipment a system doesn’t need unnecessarily increases operational costs.” 
 
Three new features within TRIMEDX’s Cyber Advanced solution will further enhance the company’s unmatched approach toward medical device cybersecurity. Ransomware attacks alone rose 123 percent in 2021, costing hospitals more than $21 billion. 
 

• The Dynamic Risk Score helps in identifying where to prioritize efforts in addressing potential vulnerabilities in connected medical devices. The score updates based on a number of factors including leveraging TRIMEDX’s proprietary content library of existing cyber vulnerabilities and approved patches and the degree of risk to patient safety. As work is performed on a device or new information is available, the score will change to continually reassess work that should be prioritized across the entire device inventory.  
• The Threats and Projects dashboard, supported by the Dynamic Risk Score, helps TRIMEDX CYBER specialists and their health system clients collaborate on and create projects. Projects can be used to prioritize vulnerabilities where healthcare providers can approve or reject compensating controls or accept the risk for a specific vulnerability.  
• The Cyber Vulnerability Tracker provides a vulnerability profile that highlights key factors to know about a new or existing vulnerability in a health system’s clinical asset inventory. Factors include identifying all of the equipment associated with the vulnerability, what the status of each device is, and whether the device is mission critical.

 
Armed with such information, health systems can better prioritize their risk mitigation and remediation efforts and ensure the most significant threats are addressed quickly. 
 
“Healthcare is targeted for cyberattacks more than any other industry, and as the use of connected medical devices continues to grow exponentially, the improvements in cybersecurity must keep up a similar pace,” said Doug Folsom, TRIMEDX chief technology officer and president of cybersecurity. “These tools help TRIMEDX and its client health systems identify and address vulnerabilities with added urgency.” 
 
TRIMEDX is an independent clinical asset management company delivering clinical engineering services, clinical asset informatics, and medical device cybersecurity. The company helps healthcare providers transform their clinical assets into strategic tools, driving reductions in operational expenses, optimizing clinical asset capital spend, maximizing resources for patient care, and delivering improved safety and protection. TRIMEDX was built by providers, for providers, and leverages a history of expert clinical engineering with data on 92 percent of all active medical device models.