Healthcare workers prioritize helping people over information security (disaster ensues)
http://boingboing.net/2016/06/28/healthcare-workers-prioritize.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29 These workarounds were driven by clinicians' need to get their jobs done and by IT's failure to understand what that entailed. For example, IT's imposition of password rotation schedules meant that no one knew what their passwords were from moment to moment, forcing them to write them down and share them (in some cases, IT might have had this policy set by vendors or regulators/insurers). Aggressive timeouts on terminals meant that clinicians spent an undue amount of time logging in, making it impossible to get their work done. Other IT-based checks forced even-more-dangerous workarounds, like the system that wouldn't let doctors save work without ordering potentially lethal blood thinners, which they'd have to remember to log back in and cancel, or kill their patients. A thumbprint-based signing system for death certificates only accepted thumbprints from one doctor, meaning that his signature was on every death certificate, regardless of whose patient the deceased had been. - - - Let's be 100% clear about this lethal situation. It is 100% the fault of the IT industry for creating systems that are so abysmally suited to the tasks at hand that healthcare workers need to behave these ways to get their jobs done and save lives. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone. _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir
