Q&A with Eric Liederman, MD, National Leader, Privacy, Security & IT Infrastructure, The Permanente Federation: “Cyber Leaders & Clinicians Must Work Together”

The more you know about your customer, the better you can serve them. And that definitely goes for health system CISOs trying to serve (and protect) their clinician customers. As Dr. Eric Liederman says, it’s not that hard to lock things down; what’s trickier is putting in place as much protection and risk mitigation as possible without compromising the ability of doctors to deliver the care that patients deserve. Liederman, who serves as National Leader for Privacy, Security & IT Infrastructure with The Permanente Federation, says the key is for cyber leaders to partner with security-minded clinicians like him, who can both help them understand the complexities of patient care, and educate doctors on the nuances of cyber risk. In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Liederman covers these issues and many more.



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Bold Statements

I realized pretty early on that, if we didn’t also attend to the protection side, we were building our castle on sand and it would ultimately risk collapse.

I really like working with my colleagues who are cybersecurity professionals. They know how to protect us, but they don’t know how to protect us while still allowing us to do the complex work of patient care. That’s something that we need to partner on.

… if you have a system where you’re having people monitor things – the term in IT has been eyes on glass – and you set it up so that they’re just being overwhelmed with false-positives, you really don’t have eyes on glass. You just have eyes glazed over.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Dr. Eric Liederman, national leader for privacy, security and IT infrastructure with The Permanente Federation. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Liederman, thanks for joining me.

Dr. Liederman: I’m glad to be on. Thanks for inviting me.

Anthony: All right, great. Let’s start off, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role. Everyone’s heard of Kaiser Permanente but The Permanente Federation could probably use a little clarity. So tell us a little bit about that entity.

Dr. Liederman: Well, Kaiser Permanente is an interesting organization the way it’s structured. Most organizations are corporations, right? They have a board of directors, a CEO and a bunch of people who work for that CEO on down. In our case, we actually have multiple companies that consist of, or come together as, Kaiser Permanente bound by unique contracts, one to the other. So we have eight medical groups, Permanente medical groups, and those are the physicians, and in the case of the California medical groups, including my own, also most are employees. The Permanente Federation is a small organization that supports all of our medical groups across the country. I also work for the Permanente Medical Group, which is the one in Northern California. So I’ve got multiple hats, multiple roles. The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, who we’re tightly partnered with, is the organization that, well, they sell the insurance and they administer the insurance. They also own the buildings and they have IT and so things like that. So mutually, an interdependent relationship between the Kaiser side and the Permanente side. I work on the Permanente side obviously.

Anthony: Okay, very good. And your role, a little bit about your role. It’s an interesting role. I think we’re seeing more.