The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is releasing a new practice guide — NIST Special Publication 1800-24, Securing Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) — to help healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) protect patient images and other pertinent medical data. Hyland Healthcare is one of the technology vendors who participated in developing this guide.
The NCCoE is a collaborative hub where industry organizations, government agencies and academic institutions work together to address businesses' most pressing cybersecurity challenges. This practice guide represents the NCCoE's dedication to public interest and the critical cybersecurity matters within the healthcare sector.
This practice guide demonstrates how commercially available technologies, like Hyland Healthcare's Acuo, NilRead and PACSgear can be integrated within existing tools, to implement a secure enterprise imaging ecosystem in support of image acquisition, image management and advanced visualization.
"Hyland Healthcare is proud to lend expertise to this effective new guide where we demonstrate the power of connected healthcare solutions to meet the complexity and risk associated with rapidly proliferating medical imaging content," said Sandra Lillie, global director, enterprise imaging sales and strategy at Hyland.
The project assesses risk for five scenarios and documents consideration of threats, vulnerabilities, likelihoods and impacts on medical imaging operations under these scenarios. The system for this project is broadly identified as the PACS, though, practically, it incorporates a set of processes and other systems that make up a medical imaging ecosystem. Hyland included the viewer workstations that interact with the medical imaging ecosystem, VNA applications, and the clinical systems that interface with modalities and the PACS environment.
The guide can be used by any organization that is deploying PACS and medical imaging systems, and that is willing to perform its own risk assessment and implement controls based on its risk posture. Both standards and best practices were used to develop two reference designs leveraging commercially available technologies. The guide also maps capabilities to NIST guidance and control families, including the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
To complete this guide, the NCCoE also collaborated with other technology vendors, including Cisco, Clearwater Compliance, Digicert, Forescout, Philips, Symantec, TDI Technologies, Tempered Networks, Tripwire, Virta Labs and Zingbox.
"Collaborating with stakeholders such as members of industry, technology providers, and integrators to produce viable cybersecurity solutions is key to the NCCoE's success. The Securing Picture Archiving and Communication System Practice Guide can help organizations reduce their risk around medical imaging and is another successful example of how stakeholders engage with the NCCoE to produce solutions to real-world problems."
The NCCoE believes the guide helps meet a critical cybersecurity and economic need, but would also like feedback from users to enhance it. To share your thoughts on this step-by-step guide, download the draft guide and provide your feedback on the NCCoE comment page. The public comment period closes on November 18, 2019.
*While the example implementation uses certain products, NIST and the NCCoE do not endorse these products. The guide presents the characteristics and capabilities of those products, which an organization's security experts can use to identify similar standards-based products that will fit within with their organization's existing tools and infrastructure.
For more information: www.hyland.com
May 21, 2025 
