Moderator: Jorge Acevedo Canabal, MD

Panel: Scott Shackleford, JD and Joseph Davis, MSFT

BIO

Dr. Jorge Acevedo Canabal is a physician and cybersecurity researcher focused on digital threats to patient safety. He helped lead Puerto Rico’s post-Maria disaster death certification training and now proposes attributing cyberattacks as a cause of death in modern healthcare.

ABSTRACT

As cyberattacks continue to increase in the healthcare sector, the full scope of human harm they cause often remains understudied. By comparing lessons learned and guidelines developed as part of public health responses to natural disasters, to current practices in response to cyberattacks in multiple healthcare scenarios, our panel will discuss current gaps in research and practice, and propose ways forward that can improve not only scoping of a cyber-incident's effects on human lives, but by doing so, enable preventive and mitigating measures to improve patient safety, especially for patients who would be most vulnerable to care complications and poor outcomes. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, we aim to illuminate the hidden harm of ransomware-locked hospitals, corrupted labs, and tampered medical devices. This session convenes clinicians, policy scholars, and security engineers to map a practical path from lessons learned in hurricane response to a cyber-mortality tracking framework. Our panel aims to dissect the scope of human harm during downtime events, address governance, liability, and data-sharing challenges, and outline how rigorous documentation could sharpen incident-response playbooks and protect rural and other high-risk populations. Join our panel discussion to learn more about how to transform silent failures into actionable data towards a framework for reporting cyber-mediated patient harm.