When I say decentralized, I mean security measures and updates taken locally at the facility. For example, MRI machines are local, and they get maintained and updated by specialists dispatched by the vendor (Siemens or GE)
Siemens or GE or whomever built the MRI machine aren't really experts in operating systems, so they just use one that everyone knows how to work, MS Windiows. It's unfortunate that to do things necessary for modern medicine they need to be networked together with other computers (to feed the EMR's most importantly) but it is important in making things safer. And these machines are supposed to have 10-20 year lifespans (depending on the machine)! So now we have a computer sitting on the corporate network, attached to a 10 year old machine, and that is a major vulnerability if it isn't protected, patched, and updated. So is GE or Siemens going to send out a technician to every machine every month when the new Windows patch rolls out? If not, the computer sitting on the network is vulnerable for how long?
Healthcare IT is very important, because computers are good at record-keeping, retrieval and storage, and that's a huge part of healthcare.
