Healthcare Cyber-Risk Board Adviser — Integrated Care Network

The mandate

The board receives technical risk scores that do not show how identity, diagnostic, medication, virtual-care or supplier failure could harm patients. Several recovery plans restore infrastructure order rather than clinical dependency order, and downtime evidence assumes normal staffing and short disruption. Its standing question is which cyber investments materially preserve safe care under prolonged technology loss across hospitals and community pathways.

The adviser commits four days monthly, works remotely and attends quarterly Toronto meetings plus Ottawa and Montreal reviews. One monthly working session tests a selected care pathway with clinical, biomedical and technology owners. Urgent incident counsel receives acknowledgement within four hours and a reasoned response within twelve, with immediate life-safety and statutory decisions explicitly referred to accountable officers.

The twelve-month appointment may renew once for six months after a documented committee effectiveness and conflict review. Renewal must identify a board question that still needs independent healthcare judgment and confirm the adviser remains outside management. A continuing cyber programme, delayed investment or desire for general incident availability alone does not warrant renewal.

The adviser holds no line authority, clinical privilege, incident command or investment vote. Executives retain care, technology, privacy and reporting accountability. The adviser may recommend diversion or service suspension for scenario planning but cannot order it during an event, communicate with patients or determine a reportable privacy breach.

Conflicts include competing providers, medical-device vendors, insurers, response firms and managed-security suppliers. All related retainers, boards and interests require disclosure and chair clearance. New work involving a regional referral partner, shared diagnostic service or vendor in the dependency map also requires written review during the appointment.

Why the board wants this voice

Clinical leaders understand harm while security leaders understand controls, but neither consistently connects the two for directors. Recent downtime exercises used technical restoration rather than safe-care criteria. The board wants independent judgment grounded in healthcare operations.

What you will own

• Challenge risk scenarios through affected care pathways, vulnerable patient cohorts, available manual workarounds, staffing constraints and time-to-harm.
• Test downtime and recovery priorities for identity, diagnostics, medication and clinical communications.
• Press management on biomedical-device ownership, vendor access and unsupported legacy dependencies.
• Review incident thresholds for care diversion, privacy notice and executive escalation.
• Shape investment choices using avoided clinical harm, dependency reduction, workaround endurance and independently tested recoverability.
• Observe exercises for workarounds that fail under staffing, duration or data-integrity stress.
• Equip directors with leading indicators tied to safe operating capability, workaround endurance and restoration of trustworthy clinical data.

Candidate qualifications

• Held CISO, clinical technology risk or resilience authority in a complex multi-site health system with board accountability.
• Can evidence cyber decisions based on patient harm rather than generic severity.
• Governed medical devices, clinical applications, identity dependencies and third-party access as one clinical cyber-risk system.
• Led prolonged downtime or ransomware exercises with clinical executives, frontline staff, biomedical teams and external care partners.
• Advised healthcare boards under privacy, patient-safety, critical-service and public-communication obligations during material disruption.
• Maintained independence from vendors whose controls or products were reviewed.

Non-negotiables

• Can sustain the response and scheduled Canadian onsite cadence.
• Will disclose healthcare, vendor, insurer and incident-response conflicts.
• Accepts no clinical, incident-command or executive authority.
• Has board-level healthcare cyber judgment, not enterprise IT alone.

1. 49 words maximum. Which current healthcare relationship could conflict with this appointment?
2. 49 words maximum. Describe a cyber scenario where clinical harm changed the recovery order.
3. 49 words maximum. Can you meet the four-hour incident acknowledgement throughout the term?