Healthcare
Clinical environments cannot be taken down for a security project. We design networks where the controls hold and the care keeps moving.
The problem healthcare networks actually have
Healthcare IT carries a burden most industries do not: a large population of connected devices that the organization cannot patch, cannot reconfigure, and cannot replace on its own schedule. Infusion pumps, imaging systems, monitors and lab analyzers arrive with the operating system the manufacturer validated, and they keep it — sometimes for a decade — because changing it can void the clearance the device was approved under.
The usual advice, patch everything, does not apply. So the exposure gets managed the only way it can be: by controlling what those devices are allowed to reach and what is allowed to reach them. That is a network design problem, not an endpoint problem, and it is the reason a flat clinical VLAN is the single most common serious finding we see in this sector.
Layered on top is an availability constraint that is genuinely different in kind. A retailer with an outage loses a day of revenue. A hospital with an outage is diverting ambulances. Maintenance windows are narrow, change control is real, and any design that assumes you can reboot the core at 9pm on a Tuesday has not met the environment.
Where we focus
Segmentation for clinical and biomedical devices
Putting medical devices in their own enforced zones, with policy that permits the specific flows they need — to their management server, their imaging archive, their vendor’s support path — and denies the rest. The goal is that an unpatchable device stays unpatchable and stops being a route to the rest of the estate. We scope this against a real inventory of what is on the wire, because the biomedical asset list and the network reality are rarely the same document.
Access control and HIPAA-aligned safeguards
The Security Rule’s technical safeguards — access control, audit controls, integrity, transmission security — are network and identity work in practice. We build the controls that satisfy them: authenticated access to clinical systems, enforced boundaries around systems handling protected health information, logging that can actually answer who reached what, and encryption of PHI in transit across the estate.
Wireless that clinicians can rely on
Coverage designed for the building as it is used — including the stairwells, elevator lobbies and shielded imaging suites that break a coverage plan drawn on a floor plate. Authentication that separates a clinical workstation on wheels from a staff phone from a patient’s laptop in the waiting room, and puts each on a network that reflects what it should be able to touch. Roaming that holds up when a nurse walks a cart down a corridor.
Guest and patient networks that stay separate
Public Wi-Fi is now an expected amenity, and it is also the most exposed thing you operate. Kept fully isolated from clinical and administrative traffic, with its own egress path, so guest access is a service you offer rather than a door into the network.
Vendor and remote access
Device manufacturers, imaging vendors and EHR support all need a path in. Each one is a standing third-party route into a clinical environment. We replace open or undocumented vendor access with brokered, identity-bound access scoped to the specific systems that vendor supports, so the access is inventoried and revocable.
Resilience for systems that cannot wait
Redundancy where an outage reaches patient care, and cutover plans built around real maintenance windows with a rehearsed rollback. Modernizing a hospital network is largely a sequencing problem — the engineering is often the easy part.
How we engage
The same three phases as the rest of our work. Start at any of them; plenty of healthcare clients come to us mid-remediation, or after an assessment somebody else ran.
Consult
What is actually connected and what it can actually reach — current topology, where clinical devices sit, where boundaries exist only on a diagram, and where the estate cannot demonstrate a control it is expected to have. You get a prioritized roadmap and a budget that matches it, whether or not we do the work.
Integrate
Design and deployment scheduled against clinical operations, not around them: staged configuration, short rehearsed cutover windows, and a rollback path at every step. The engineer who scoped the work is the engineer who performs it.
Manage
Monitoring, firmware and patch lifecycle for the infrastructure, configuration change control, and regular review of whether the segmentation still matches the devices that have arrived since. Clinical estates change constantly; the point of managing one is to notice.
On compliance
We build and operate controls that support HIPAA compliance, and we produce the evidence — configurations, logs, access records, network documentation — that an assessment or an audit asks for. What we do not do is issue attestations or act as your auditor. HIPAA compliance is an organizational program covering administrative and physical safeguards as well as technical ones; we own the technical layer and work alongside whoever owns the rest.
The same applies where an organization is working to a broader framework such as NIST or HITRUST. See Compliance & Risk for how the assessment and readiness work is structured.
Who this is for
- Hospitals and health systems whose clinical network grew alongside the building and now needs an architecture rather than another addition.
- Physician groups, specialty practices and outpatient clinics with multiple sites and a small IT team carrying all of them.
- Organizations facing a risk analysis, a payer requirement or an incident review with an estate that cannot currently evidence its controls.
- Behavioral health, dental, imaging and lab providers handling PHI without hospital-scale IT resources behind them.
- Any provider where biomedical devices sit on the same flat network as everything else — the most common condition we are called in to fix.
Ready to hand off the tech?
Book a free technology & security assessment. We'll map your gaps and give you a prioritized roadmap — no obligation, no jargon.