Q&A with UC San Diego Health CISO Scott Currie & Medical Director of Cybersecurity Christian Dameff

As a practicing ER physician, Christian Dameff, medical director of cybersecurity at UC San Diego Health, is one of the first in the nation to bridge the clinical world and cybersecurity, thus bringing credibility and understanding of cyber efforts to the clinical team. Dameff works closely with CISO Scott Currie and, in this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, the duo talk about how excited they are to team up, while also discussing what the future holds with the advent of ChatGPT, machine learning and how these new technologies will shape the challenges in cybersecurity going forward.



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TOC



* A Unique Role

* The Light Bulb Moment

* Regional Ransomware Effects

* Keys to Communicating with Clinicians

* The Importance of Keeping it Real

* Educate, Don’t Order

* Wading into the AI Pool

* Attacking Integrity

* Social Engineering Going Strong

* AI on the Vendor Side

* Evidence-Based Cyber



Anthony: Christian and Scott, thanks for joining me.

Christian: Happy to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.

Scott: Thank you, Anthony.

Anthony:  All right, great. I usually ask you about your organization and roles. Christian, I’m going put you on the spot first. You’ve been there longer. So can you explain about the organization a little bit, and your role? And then Scott, tell us a little bit about your role.

Christian: UC San Diego health is a large academic quaternary healthcare delivery organization in San Diego, California. We operate a myriad of clinics out in the community, as well as two larger hospitals. One in La Jolla, California and one in downtown San Diego. We have a very large organization, lots of employees, but we also are closely integrated with our academic counterpart across the street in La Jolla, the University of California, San Diego. And so we have a large undergraduate and graduate population, and quite an impressive amount of engineering students and others that all play a part in this conversation moving forward. So we’re a large academic healthcare center. And generally speaking, I think we’re very much forward thinking. And as I think we’ll get into later on in this discussion, we’re looking to shake things up. That’s our brand and our excitement around that area of innovation.

Anthony: And Christian, you have an interesting role, which I don’t think a lot of organizations have, and maybe today we’re going to learn why they might want to think about it. But tell me a little bit about your role.

A Unique Role

Christian: So I’m an ER doc by training. So most of the time, when I’m at work, you’ll find me in the trenches of the emergency departments. But I also serve an operational role here with Scott as the medical director of cybersecurity. It is a very unique role. In fact, it’s the first one in the nation, to our knowledge, which really put a clinician – someone like a nurse or a doctor, someone who takes care of patients – in a cybersecurity role, where I help straddle, if you will, the intersection of clinical care and cybersecurity.