Jun 28, 2019

FDA warns about insulin pump cybersecurity

Caitlin Owens, author of Vitals

Photo: Calmettes/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Something new for diabetes patients to worry about: Someone nearby could potentially connect wirelessly to your Medtronic MiniMed insulin pump, the FDA warned yesterday.

My thought bubble: While the agency said that, as far as it knows, no one has actually hacked into someone else's insulin pump and harmed them, this is the future of health care cyber risk.

What to watch:

  • They could then change the pump's settings, causing it to deliver too much or too little insulin to the patient.
  • The agency said that patients using certain models of the pump should switch to less vulnerable ones.

Related: Kaiser Health News outlines five trends it found in the FDA's once-hidden database of medical device malfunctions and injuries.

  • Blood glucose meters for diabetes patients had the most unique incident reports in the database: 2.4 million reports over 20 years.
  • The database was only made public after KHN published an investigation into it.

Go deeper: Hospitals homing in on medical device cybersecurity

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