BIO

Dr. Isabel Straw is an Emergency Doctor, Assistant Professor in Healthcare Artificial Intelligence at University College London, and Cybersecurity Researcher at the University of California, San Diego Centre for Healthcare Cybersecurity. At University College London she leads the CRASH Team (Cybersecurity Resiliency & AI Safety in Healthcare) and has a research background in Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on AI bias, Large Language Models (LLMs), and patient harms arising from digital health technologies.

ABSTRACT

Introducing CIPHER: an open-source platform exposing how hospital cyberattacks harm patients in real time. CIPHER - “Cyberattack Impacts, Patient Harm and Emergency Response” - transforms digital system failures into downstream clinical effects, mapping patient deaths, delays, and adverse safety incidents across clinical specialties, technical systems, and time.

At its core is the CIPHER Cube, a powerful model built from diverse data sources, including academic papers, frontline reports and social media testimonies, that maps patient harms occurring throughout the healthcare ecosystem. Our models identify complex intersecting patient safety incidents, including adverse effects resulting from missed chemotherapy infusions, delayed C-sections in obstetrics, diagnostic errors in emergency care, and systemic drug dispensing failures. By reframing cyber-risk through the lens of patient safety - not just IT disruption - CIPHER offers a radical new methodology for healthcare security, and a call to action for hackers, medics, and regulators alike to make invisible harm impossible to ignore.