Help Wanted: Cybersecurity Contractor

Feds seek help with healthcare assessment
Help Wanted: Cybersecurity Contractor
The federal government is seeking a contractor to help assess healthcare cybersecurity risks in the public and private sectors.

The contractor also will create and test risk mitigation strategies. The results of the project will help support development of federal policies.

The 18-month project will focus on "creating a safe and secure health information technology ecosystem that spans the public and private healthcare sectors," says Deborah Lafky, Ph.D., who will manage the project for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. ONC is a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Preliminary notice

HHS posted a very preliminary "presolicitation" notice for the program on Feb. 16. The notice states, "The purpose of this contract is to carry out a sequence of related activities with the goal of understanding security risks to health information technology, planning and executing risk mitigation strategies, testing certain risk mitigation strategies, communicating to stakeholders the results, lessons learned, and actions that can be taken to reduce risk in HIT, which will create the foundation for policy development."

The project is designed to help support the goals of the HITECH Act, which provides Medicare and Medicaid financial incentives for using electronic health records plus a variety of grants to promote the exchange of clinical information.

The notice states that ramping up the creation and exchange of EHRs, "steps up the need to protect these strategic information resources against cybersecurity threats."

To view the notice, visit www.fbo.gov and look for solicitation number OS28871.


About the Author

Howard Anderson

Howard Anderson

Former News Editor, ISMG

Anderson was news editor of Information Security Media Group and founding editor of HealthcareInfoSecurity and DataBreachToday. He has more than 40 years of journalism experience, with a focus on healthcare information technology issues. Before launching HealthcareInfoSecurity, he served as founding editor of Health Data Management magazine, where he worked for 17 years, and he served in leadership roles at several other healthcare magazines and newspapers.




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