Dutch giant Philips announced the expansion of its medical device cyber-security services at this month’s HIMSS conference in Florida.

The company is introducing a secure remote access management service, leveraging security capabilities enabled by the integration of Texas software company SecureLink’s critical access management and governance technology with Philips Remote Services’ secure connectivity framework for technical and clinical support.

The services provide benefits for healthcare providers including increased uptime, clinical performance and security to help protect access to their clinical products and medical devices.

“We are continuously expanding the foundation of Philips cyber-security services and this type of integration is a strong complement to our offering, giving our customers more options for building robust cyber-security programmes,” said Gal Gnainsky, head of security at Philips. “As healthcare providers’ cyber-security requirements continue to increase, partnering with SecureLink highlights Philips’ focus on providing more secure access management and protecting health networks down to granular device level.”

Remote services have become an essential component of the digital transformation of healthcare. Philips’ portfolio of remote services is used to monitor key performance parameters for many clinical systems and devices on a continuous basis and alert customers of potential issues and rectify them, often remotely, before they result in system or device failures that interrupt patient care.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, they helped keep hospitals operational at a time when on-site maintenance was logistically difficult. Applying artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics to the acquired data, they are also important to support the goals of zero system downtime, increased efficiency and seamless uninterrupted workflows.

By integrating with SecureLink’s vendor privileged access management and governance capabilities, the Philips remote services portfolio provides additional capabilities, offering a uniform level of security, visibility, traceability and audit capability needed for critical access management and data security. SecureLink lets users manage privileged access sessions with rich audit logging, limiting access to relevant devices and systems and granting only need-to-know permissions required to monitor or maintain them.

“SecureLink is the industry leader in critical access management, empowering organisations to secure access to their most valuable assets, including networks, systems and data,” said Joel Burleson Davis, chief technology officer at SecureLink. “By partnering with Philips, we are extending the web of security offered by our critical access management technology across their customer base and the healthcare ecosystem at large. With cyber crime in healthcare at an all-time high, partnerships like that between SecureLink and Philips are essential to protecting healthcare systems, data and patients from today’s increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.”

The Philips cyber-security services portfolio comprises an end-to-end suite of technologies and services to safeguard medical systems, devices and related software regardless of vendor, helping empower the digital transformation in healthcare. The company’s approach to cyber security is characterised by end-to-end security-by-design principles that focus on security during product design, development, testing and deployment right through to in-use performance monitoring, system updates and incident response management.

Philips also contributes to the development of national and international cyber-security standards for medical devices, and its cyber-security services portfolio aligns with global cyber-security best practices and standards. Its remote services operating environment implements security controls that meet the ISO/IEC 27001 information security management standard.