Medigate partners with Cerner to secure medical devices and networks

Medigate, an Israeli startup working to secure medical devices and manage assets inside a hospital, has partnered with the medical information technology juggernaut Cerner on services and support for the Israeli company’s security software.

Under the agreement, if customers work with Medigate, they’ll receive support from Cerner’s cybersecurity team to help with inventory of the devices in a location. Cerner will also offer remediation services to limit attacks if an organization has a security breach.

“With IDC estimating about 41.6 billion IoT devices in the field by 2025, it is extremely important that healthcare organizations have more visibility and control over what’s going on in their clinical network – and that needs to include medical devices and IoT devices,” said Medigate chief executive Jonathan Langer, in a statement. “Cerner has spent the last 40 years connecting people and systems within the healthcare industry. Working together will help thousands of health systems establish and maintain better control, to protect their data, ongoing operations and, ultimately, patient care.”

The security risks associated with increasingly networked healthcare technologies is an increasing area of concern for security professionals and a growing area of interest among venture investors and large corporations in the healthcare space alike.

“It’s important that the healthcare industry proactively work to prevent data breaches and cyberthreats rather than wait to react after the damage has been done,” said Jay Savaiano, senior director of Security Solutions at Cerner. “Our work with Medigate is a critical step in the right direction towards effective medical device security across healthcare organizations. We’re committed to helping our clients discover, manage and protect operations from today’s attacks and tomorrow’s threats.”

Medigate has a number of competitors looking at medical device and network security in the healthcare industry. Medcrypt, a recent graduate of the Y Combinator accelerator, raised $5.3 million earlier this year to tackle the problem, and other companies, like Elektra Labs, are also looking at the security profiles of devices and therapies as part of an overall assessment of their efficacy.