The FDA released its final Guidance on Postmarket Management of Cybersecurity in Medical Devices during the week between Christmas and New Year. You can link to a full copy here, and we gave you our detailed take on the draft Guidance here. You can also click here to see what our data privacy and security colleagues wrote about the final Guidance on Reed Smith’s Technology Law Dispatch, as they beat us to the presses.

The final Guidance resembles the draft, with a few refinements. We see two guiding principles in the final Guidance.  First, the final Guidance continues to follow a risk-based approach.  As we observed before, the FDA could not have taken a different tack.  Medical devices always present both benefits and risks, and the goal of regulators when it comes to cybersecurity is to assess and mitigate risks without overly compromising a device’s benefits.  Second, the FDA recognizes that managing medical device cybersecurity takes a village.  Or, in the Agency’s words, “FDA recognizes that medical device cybersecurity is a shared responsibility among stakeholders including health care facilities, patients, providers, and manufacturers of medical devices.”  Guidance, at 12.

The final Guidance therefore recommends the implementation of cybersecurity risk management programs.  Such  programs would include monitoring reported adverse events under current regulations.  The FDA also recommends incorporating elements consistent with the National Institute for Standards and Technology’s Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity.  Guidance, at 14.  We commented in our prior post that the FDA was combining familiar medical device elements with others borrowed from the cybersecurity world.  The citation to NIST’s Framework is a perfect example of the wedding between those two worlds.

More specifically, a cybersecurity risk management program would include:

• Monitoring cybersecurity information sources for identification and detection of cybersecurity vulnerabilities and risk;
• Maintaining robust software lifecycle processes;
• Understanding, assessing and detecting presence and impact of a vulnerability;
• Establishing and communicating processes for vulnerability intake and handling;
• Using threat modeling to define clearly how to maintain safety and essential performance of a device by developing mitigations that protect, respond and recover from the cybersecurity risk;
• Adopting a coordinated vulnerability disclosure policy and practice; and
• Deploying mitigations that address cybersecurity risk early and prior to exploitation.

Continue Reading What You Need To Know About the FDA’s Guidance on Postmarket Cybersecurity