Episode 24- How Medical Device Security Protects Care At Scale. With Phil Englert

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?