AdvaMed will write industry standards for cybersecurity, privacy and interoperability, board chairman Mick Farrell said at a press event at the MedTech Conference in Boston on October 19. Farrell, who runs ResMed, compared the effort to a code of ethics and said the aim is to raise the bar across the whole industry. He pointed to his own cloud-connected respiratory devices as the reason the spending never stops.
Kirsten Tullia, AdvaMed's executive director of digital health technology, said the group is building forums for chief information security officers and other training. The gap AdvaMed names is the smaller manufacturer: same connected device exposure, no security organization behind it. Scott Whitaker, AdvaMed's chief executive, used the same event on FDA staffing and the hiring targets written into this year's user fee talks.
There is no timeline and no draft text yet. Voluntary industry standards usually reach a small company as a hospital procurement questionnaire well before they reach it as regulation, so that is the date worth watching.