The stakesAn IT failure in a hospital is a clinical event. A breach is a patient-safety violation.
Patient records are not like payment data - they cannot be rotated, reissued, or cancelled after a breach. A medical history, a diagnostic report, a prescription record: once exposed, the damage is permanent and personal in a way that no other category of corporate data matches. Meanwhile, ransomware that takes a hospital's HIS or PACS offline does not queue the work for later - it forces clinicians to divert, delay, and operate without the records they depend on. Healthcare IT demands a discipline most technology providers have never had to develop: where security posture, infrastructure reliability, and data integrity are evaluated as patient-safety obligations, not performance targets.