Healthcare Transformation: Cybersecurity Must Be Proactive
Given that the elderly population is concentrated in rural areas and medical resources are concentrated in urban areas, how to address the imbalance and disparity in urban-rural medical resources through the enhancement of technological equipment and network frequency is an important issue. The "zero-contact" services brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have once again brought telemedicine to the forefront of critical issues. Integrating technology, cloud computing, computer processing, and the internet to solve problems for different medical demand-side parties and provide medical services has led to the emergence of three models, including:
1. Two points, one line: such as online consultations.
2. Single-point movement: healthcare professionals enter communities to provide services.
3. Data movement: using physiological data recording devices to record and manage personal health information.
Taiwan's telemedicine trends are similar to international ones. While medical problems across countries share commonalities, customized platforms, software, and IoT medical devices are required to achieve optimal medical efficacy, depending on the region, target audience, and specific actions. Therefore, the technological tools needed for telemedicine must be highly flexible, capable of shaping different unique medical behaviors, and also consider ease of use. How to simplify complex technology and integrate it into people's lives is a goal that countries worldwide are striving for.
Taiwan's telemedicine has been developing for a decade. Diseases present problems, which drive the development and application of technology. Technology and applications build business models. Through these business models, appropriate medical behaviors are delivered to target audiences in need. Industry, government, and academia are strengthening different aspects of this model, hoping that telemedicine will gradually mature through this process.
Communication, cloud, and technology are elevating telemedicine to new heights. At the same time, data preservation and message accuracy are becoming crucial, which can be broadly divided into two aspects: the accessibility of data in databases and whether data in transit can be properly protected by encryption and translation to enhance privacy. Telemedicine service providers initially prioritized the concept of scale development and service innovation. However, once a cybersecurity crisis occurs, their security and economic profitability will be significantly affected. Currently, the common approach is to set up platforms on the hospital's private cloud, with information remaining within the hospital's firewall. The connection, transmission, and integration aspects are managed by VPN (Virtual Private Network) access control. As telemedicine technology and regulations gradually mature, telemedicine can be realized under existing legal regulations and cybersecurity safeguards.
The process of telemedicine cybersecurity protection needs to balance medical timeliness and accuracy, allowing users to choose corresponding strategies based on current situations to provide the most appropriate medical resources. This means that cybersecurity protection should be flexible and vary according to data type, confidentiality, transmission method, and distance, with different regulations for different scenarios. Data with higher sensitivity has lower fluidity and is more difficult to obtain. Therefore, how to find a balance between the convenience of data access and cybersecurity, making compromises and trade-offs, is the most urgent issue for our country in developing telemedicine.