The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health awarded UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers $9.5 million for their work in protecting health care from cyber attacks. 

The ARPA-H is a government organization that seeks to provide funding for research that “cannot be readily accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity,” according to the ARPA-H website.

Medical Director of Cybersecurity for UCSD Health Christian Dameff explained to The UCSD Guardian the impact of receiving the award. UCSD is currently at the forefront of this healthcare ransomware research, being the first U.S. patient care organization to have a director of cybersecurity, Dameff. 

“A big part of this ARPA-H award is really how do we — not solve healthcare ransomware but — how do we better disrupt and change the consequences that we’re seeing on hospitals — rich, poor, rural, urban — across the whole world,” Dameff said.

As technology becomes more entwined with the healthcare sector, there have been increasing risks not only toward the security of patient information, but also the ability for medical professionals to use critical technology.  

“With this connectivity that we’ve infused into every facet of modern healthcare, we have vulnerabilities … we’ve just been seeing escalating year after year attacks on health care,” Dameff said. “It’s not just your privacy and your security of your data. But now it’s this new world where your health can be affected adversely by these attacks. And I want to study how that happens, how we can make it better, and how we can make our systems more resilient to those types of attacks.” 

Dameff stressed that he is not alone in these research endeavors. 

“We have a big clinical core,” he said. “We have a lot of doctors that practice everything from anesthesia, emergency medicine, internal medicine to get a very diversified view on the care of patients, and then we have a really cool informatics core.”

Chief Medical Officer and Chief Digital Officer at UC San Diego Health Christopher Longhurst underscored to UCSD Today the role the university plays in this developing field. 

“UC San Diego is a world leader in health care cybersecurity, and this new center will keep us on the cutting edge of this critically understudied field for years to come.”  

While the university is making progress, Dameff hopes to see further progress across the entire healthcare sector. 

“Quite frankly, I think the federal government needs to make an investment in healthcare cybersecurity if you really want to move the needle nationally,” he added.