Healthcare sector entities badly must do better when dealing with disruptive cyber events, especially incidents that have industrywide impact, said Greg Garcia, executive director of cybersecurity of the Health Sector Coordinating Council.
The HSCC and the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center are hosting in July a two-day joint national cybersecurity tabletop exercise for the health sector to test enterprise and cross-sector response and recovery, including impacts to critical functions and patient safety, Garcia said during an interview with Information Security Media Group during the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society 2026 conference in Las Vegas.
Regulated health sector players – including insurers, pharmaceutical companies, device makers and healthcare providers – are urged to participate, whether or not they are members of HSCC’s cybersecurity working group or the Health-ISAC, Garcia said.
“We’ll invite the government, as well,” he said.
HSCC and Health-ISAC are also aiming for a diverse range of individual participants, he said. “We want to bring different roles from the various teams and individuals that are involved with incident response within their own organizations – including compliance, general counsel and the operations people, even the CEO, he said.
“We want to have different disciplines working together on this.”
HSCC has previously hosted smaller exercises but the scale and scope of the national tabletop will be larger and more intensive, he said. “We’ll be testing not just internal capabilities and response mechanisms but how we coordinate across boundaries,” he said.
The national virtual tabletop will be two, half-days taking place July 21-22.
In the interview (see audio link below photo), Garcia also discussed:
- The type of industry-wide cyber scenario that might be used for the exercise;
- How the participating entities can tap into the tabletop for better incident response at their own organizations;
- The importance of improved cyber incident response preparedness across the healthcare and public health sector.
Prior to joining HSCC, Garcia was the nation’s first Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications under President George W. Bush. He also served as executive director of the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council and held executive positions with Bank of America, 3Com Corp. and the Information Technology Association of America and Americans for Computer Privacy.