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 healthcare systems become increasingly digitized, cyber incidents like ransomware attacks and EHR outages are no longer just IT problems—they're potential contributors to patient harm and mortality. This expert panel explores the groundbreaking proposal to adapt disaster-related death certification frameworks to document cyber incidents as secondary causes of death. Bringing together expertise in cybersecurity governance, healthcare economics, investigative journalism, and clinical practice, panelists will examine the policy implications, implementation challenges, and public health benefits of standardizing how we document and track cyber-induced patient harm.