From Cybersecurity to Community Impact: How Securing IoMT Devices Inspired a Blood Donation Journey

Every day, Asimily’s staff work with and talk to healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) about cybersecurity and Internet of Things (IoT) device security. We listen to our customers, and we empathize with their challenges. While many of our employees have spent time in the healthcare security trenches, others are new to the field, gaining a sense of the urgency and breadth of the challenge through conversations. 

As a business development representative, Ryan Hanusik has worked with many of our customers to understand their pain points and challenges. As part of his work on Asimily’s partnership with Blood Centers of America (BCA), Ryan found that he wanted to do more than talk about the importance of blood donations; he wanted to give back to the organization meaningfully. 

From Involvement to Inspiration

Although Ryan had given blood once in the past, working with BCA to help them secure their Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices broadened his awareness of how important blood donations are. Throughout his customer conversations, Ryan realized how easy it is to give blood and how valuable that one person’s donation is. 

Inspired to make a difference, Ryan was surprised to learn just how easy BCA makes the process of finding a local center. After entering his zip code, he was directed to a donation center only a few blocks from his home. 

While at the facility, the impact of giving blood truly became clear as different people donating shared stories of how a stranger’s blood donation helped them or their family members. 

“People were sharing their stories about why they were giving blood. A blood transfusion had saved many of their lives – or the lives of family members. This very-easy activity has the power to save so many people.”

A Glimpse into Impact

Walking into the donation center, the gravity of securing the blood center IoMT truly hit Ryan. As an Asimily employee, he had long read about the different cyber attacks against blood donation centers. He’d seen the articles talking about attackers targeting non-profit blood donation centers and the impact it had across hospitals in the southeastern United States. Even recently, the New York City donation center faced a ransomware attack, turning these ‘what-ifs’ into a tangible reality. Looking around at the vast number of IoMT devices in these centers, he understood the breadth of the struggle his customers face. 

For the first time, Ryan had a true appreciation for the struggle that his blood center customers face every day. The technologies that he’s talked about with clients went from pictures on a computer screen to a reality, giving him a first-person look at devices like:

• Digital data loggers that measure and record blood storage conditions and temperatures
• Thermocouples, Resistance Temperature Detectors (RTDs), and thermistors that read the temperatures
• Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that track blood bag location and status within the blood bank 
• Sensors that detect the presence or absence of blood bags to ensure accurate inventory tracking 

While the average blood donor may not have the same focus, Ryan realized that each of these critical lab and medical devices poses an attack threat when malicious actors seek to exploit their vulnerabilities. His work at Asimily, a company purpose-built to secure these devices, truly helps these small organizations who do such important life-saving work. By giving organizations like BCA the ability to analyze vulnerabilities in these devices and harden them, the teams can focus on managing blood donations and saving lives. 

Partnering with BCA for a More Secure Future

For Ryan, these insights into how blood donation centers work enable him to gain a better sense of the important work he does. BCA is a membership group that consists of small organizations, ones that often struggle to find and implement the security technologies that protect their donors and the patients who rely on them. 

Recognizing the important role that blood donations have in saving lives, Ryan has a newfound appreciation and respect for his BCA customers. While the average donor may not think about lab device security, Ryan knows that these indispensable devices are critical to patient care. More importantly, the average donor and patient should not have to worry about the security of these devices, a donation center’s ability to collect and supply blood, or a hospital’s ability to provide life-saving transfusions. 

For Ryan, this experience truly highlighted the important role that Asimily plays in helping healthcare organizations provide the best patient care possible. While it’s easy to talk about securing IoMT devices in the abstract to have sympathy for customers, donating blood and seeing the impact that BCA and its members have on people’s health gave him the experience that allows him to truly empathize with his customers so that he can work with them to protect devices and, ultimately, patients.