A cyberattack on a vendor shouldn’t be the moment a hospital learns how interconnected its world really is. We sit down with Greg Surla, Chief Information Security Officer at FinThrive, to unpack how third‑party risk, revenue cycle platforms, and frontline care are woven together—and why resilience depends on planning with partners before the crisis hits. From joint tabletop exercises that include critical vendors to pre-approved workarounds like VDI access and hardened loaner devices, we map the moves that keep care running when networks go dark.

Greg shares blunt lessons from breaches and acquisitions: forgotten cloud servers, weak asset inventories, and the relentless toll of a three‑week ransomware fight. The takeaway isn’t fear; it’s preparation. We dig into ransomware‑specific drills, cyber insurance that funds expert responders, and the automation needed to triage the daily flood of vulnerabilities. We also explore culture as a control, showing how life‑first security education—holiday scams, tax fraud, device safety—builds habits that protect both home and hospital, and creates the groundswell that gets C‑suite support.

As AI supercharges attackers and budget pressures squeeze providers, cybersecurity has to be framed as a business enabler. Secure revenue cycle equals payroll, access to care, and community trust. Greg explains how to translate risk for boards, align controls to clinical and financial goals, and replace reflexive “no” with “yes, if” to stay part of the conversation that shapes strategy. The result is a practical, human playbook for healthcare security: automate the routine, practice the hard days with partners, invest in asset visibility, and collaborate across the industry. Subscribe, share with a colleague who handles vendor risk, and leave a review with your top resilience tactic—we’ll feature the best ideas in a future show.

A hospital room can hold 10 to 20 networked devices, each vital to care—and each a potential doorway for attackers. We sit down with Phil Englert, VP of Medical Device Security at Health ISAC, to explore how connected care improves outcomes while reshaping risk, and why building resilience and rapid recovery plans is now as critical as prevention.

Phil traces the evolution from clinician-driven data sharing to an era where massive datasets attract criminal interest. We dig into the Patch Act’s new authority for the FDA, how SBOMs change accountability, and what secure-by-design looks like for both embedded systems and devices running full operating systems. The conversation gets practical: segment where you can, monitor where you must, and treat cyber as a failure mode. That mindset leads to faster restorations—ghosted drives ready to swap, configs backed up, and downtime measured in hours rather than weeks.

We also pull back the curtain on Health ISAC’s member-led workstreams: aligning manufacturers and providers on a concise set of priority controls, creating shared security metrics that resonate from boardroom to engineering, and running joint tabletop exercises to close response gaps. Beyond the hospital, we examine AI-enabled diagnostics and the rise of hospital-at-home, where patient-owned tech can’t be trusted as a control point and multilingual, culturally aware resources become essential for scale. Throughout, we tackle tough questions—why attackers target data over device manipulation, whether paying ransom actually speeds recovery, and how to keep care moving when the EHR or network goes dark.

If you care about medical device security, healthcare cybersecurity, ransomware resilience, or the future of connected care, this conversation offers clear takeaways and next steps. Listen, share with your team, and help raise the floor across healthcare. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what control would you prioritize first?

The conversation explores how healthcare’s rapid digitization has improved patient outcomes while dramatically increasing cyber risk, making hospitals lucrative, constantly targeted entities. Dr. C.S. Kruse traces his path from Army Medical Service Corps IT specialist to academic leader and prolific researcher in health IT and cybersecurity, emphasizing both technology’s clinical benefits and its “dark side.”He and host Dan Dodson discuss AI as a dual-use tool, underinvestment and budget tensions, ransomware-driven clinical disruptions, basic but often-missed security practices, EU-style cyber resiliency standards, and the need for stronger policy, mandatory reporting, and resilient clinical workflows when systems fail.