On Friday (July 19), 8.5 million Windows computers crashed. One reason: Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity software company, sent out a bad update. Healthcare systems were also affected, including pharmaceutical and other software that University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH). The latter closed outpatient clinics in Lübeck and Kiel for three days and postponed elective procedures. Other industries were even more affected, such as banks, airlines, airports and supermarkets.
Demands arose from politicians and also from medical forums that dependencies on individual companies in important areas should be avoided – and that digital processes should always be secured in such a way that they can also be represented in analogue form.
But how realistic are these demands in a society and a healthcare system that are interconnected in increasingly complex structures? What risks are we as a society willing to take in exchange for greater efficiency and technical progress, from which, if there is any doubt, patients, but also clinics and practices, benefit through improved processes? In the podcast “ÄrzteTag”, general practitioner and lawyer Professor Christian Dierks discusses whether incidents such as problems with an update can be a reason to progress more slowly with the digitalization of the healthcare system in order to exclude risks as much as possible.
Dierks, who as a lawyer has also dealt extensively with issues relating to the digitalization of the healthcare system, describes the increasingly complex problems as the different systems in a clinic or practice interact with one another. In terms of liability law, a distinction must always be made between controllable risks – “it must not happen that the wrong leg is amputated” – and those that are caused externally.
How large facilities, so-called critical infrastructures in particular, deal with these risks, how security measures in learning systems must become increasingly better to counteract the increasing dangers, and why, in case of doubt, opportunities for better medicine are missed if all risks are to be neutralized – Christian Dierks asks these questions in the “ÄrzteTag” podcast. (Duration: 22:30 minutes)