Q&A with WVU Medicine CISO Hunter Barbour

If you don’t want to keep learning, heading up IT security for a health system is probably not for you. At least that’s one obvious takeaway from speaking to WVU Medicine CISO Hunter Barbour, who lists the impending marriage of AI and quantum computing as a possible game changer for security professionals. So Barbour is going to keep his eye on that, along with never taking his eye off all the other threat balls. In fact, Barbour says not being distracted by what are often intentional feints by the bad guys is an important characteristic of any successful security program. In this interview with healthsystemCIO Founder and Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Barbour discuss these issues, along with how he learned a lot about security, (not surprisingly) from his time running IT for a prison.



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TOC



Top Three Threats 

When AI Meets Quantum  

Staying Up on Evolving Threats

Sophisticated Misdirection

Jail Tales

Good Governance

In HITRUST We Trust?

Not No, But Yes If



Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemsCIO’s interview with Hunter Barbour, Chief Information Security Officer with WVU Medicine. I’m Anthony Guerra, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. Hunter, thanks for joining me.

Hunter: Hi. Thank you for having me, Anthony.

Anthony: Hunter, do you want to start off by telling me a little bit about your organization and your role?

Hunter: Yes, sir. As Chief Information Security Officer, I’m responsible for pretty much the security of all assets and data within the health system. That includes managed devices, unmanaged devices, IoT, IoMT and setting policies and procedures around the use of that data and how we handle that with regulatory organizations.

I have a really strong governance team with privacy, compliance, HR and our insurance, legal team where we meet on a regular basis to go over governance and issues that we’re running into throughout the health system, but it’s a wide array. We are, at this point, 25 hospitals, in the neighborhood of 850 clinics, that’s ambulatory and other clinics, and then we have, of course, some different institutions where we do special research such as like neuroscience, cardiovascular, things like that. We have a pretty robust program around research and development within the healthcare space.

Anthony: Very good. I want to start with an open-ended question and just see what’s on your mind. What are some of the trends you’re looking at, things you’re working on?

Top Three Threats

Hunter: Right now, I’ll tell you the emergence of conversational AI, the emergence of that into the healthcare industry I think is both disruptive and also something that we’re having to address right away. Your larger firms such as Microsoft have announced they’re  partnering with ChatGPT and AI platforms such as that. We’re having to adapt to that and adapt our policies and procedures around how we handle AI. We do have an internal AI group within WVU Medicine where we build and develop our own AI – it’s ground breaking and amazing, and has created lots of different avenues for us to pull data and make the lives of physicians easier. There is a place for AI, it’s just that I think a measured approach is needed.