Specialties with a high concentration of primary care providers, family medicine groups, community practices, and multispecialty clinics tend to feel the need for managed security service provider (MSSP) support first. These organizations manage huge patient panels every day, often caring for people with disabilities, chronic conditions, or dual-eligibility status.
Their workflow depends on constant coordination and uninterrupted access to EHRs, portals, and scheduling systems. Any security breach can disrupt not just operations but chronic-care continuity, which is why many of these practices now lean on MSSPs to harden their infrastructure, monitor threats around the clock, and close the gaps that overworked IT teams can’t always catch.
A qualitative study from Health (Amsterdam) notes, “We estimated positive regression coefficients for a greater proportion of primary care providers in the [Accountable Care Organizations] ACO, more practicing physicians on the governing board, physician leadership, active engagement in reducing hospital re-admissions, a greater proportion of disabled Medicare beneficiaries, financial incentives offered to physicians, a larger financial benchmark, and greater ACO market penetration.”
The takeaway applies cleanly to cybersecurity as physician-led, data-heavy, high-throughput practices perform better when leadership prioritizes governance and continuous monitoring, core areas where MSSPs reinforce internal capabilities.
Large systems, integrated delivery networks, academic medical centers, and multi-hospital organizations feel the urgency even more. Their environments are sprawling and complex, with thousands of endpoints, hundreds of vendors, cloud migrations in progress, and legacy systems that can’t be taken offline.
Coordinating cybersecurity across these networks is nearly impossible without external managed security support. MSSPs give these systems structured, scalable threat detection, unified logging, and dedicated incident-response expertise that internal teams rarely have the bandwidth to maintain.
Modern cancer care depends on tightly networked tools, radiation therapy systems, treatment-planning software, real-time imaging, and device-driven workflows that attackers increasingly target. These systems are attractive to ransomware groups because even a brief outage can delay life-saving treatment.
Those delays matter. Interruptions in therapy for cancers such as head and neck or cervical disease have been linked to poorer tumor control and worse overall outcomes. According to Emerging Cybersecurity Threats in Radiation Oncology, the scope of the problem is larger than many realize; in the last 10 years, numerous attacks have led to an interruption of radiation therapy for thousands of patients, underscoring how fragile these systems can be under cyber pressure.
Oncology departments must operate with a mindset of assuming these breaches are possible. That means enforcing multifactor authentication, strengthening endpoint protection, maintaining offline backups, and preparing for supply-chain vulnerabilities tied to third-party software, legacy systems, and unpatched IoT devices. Because radiation oncology is almost entirely computer-driven, federal advisories consistently warn that hospitals should expect more frequent and sophisticated attacks, and that zero-trust architectures and shared threat intelligence are now baseline expectations.
MSSPs help by providing continuous monitoring, rapid incident response, and business-continuity planning that keeps treatment schedules stable even during outages. Their support also protects vast volumes of sensitive data, including genomic profiles and precision medicine records.
Behavioral health and addiction treatment programs face some of the highest MSSP needs, largely because they rely heavily on teletherapy platforms and EHR systems that store highly sensitive and often stigmatized mental health information. Direct cybersecurity research in this space is limited, but MSSP analyses consistently show how much these specialties depend on secure care coordination to reduce inpatient utilization, manage medication gaps, and support high-risk patients.
One Health Research & Educational Trust analysis put it plainly, noting that “MSSP ACOs were associated with small reductions in outpatient and inpatient mental health and substance use care visits, and an increase in psychotropic medications.”
Behavioral health and addiction providers benefit from ACO participation because it gives them the structure to manage complex populations while protecting data that patients already worry about sharing. These programs depend on longitudinal tracking and uninterrupted care, and MSSP support helps prevent digital disruptions that can worsen relapse risk or break the continuity that recovery depends on.
Women’s health and reproductive clinics urgently need MSSP support because they handle some of the most sensitive data in healthcare, fertility histories, prenatal records, genetic testing results, and that information now moves through EHRs, patient portals, and a growing mix of connected devices.
These tools help clinicians deliver more responsive care, but they also widen the attack surface in ways many smaller clinics simply are not prepared to manage. As one study, Cybersecurity requirements for medical devices in the EU and US - A comparison and gap analysis of the MDCG 2019–16 and FDA premarket cybersecurity guidance, explains, “The use of software in medical devices connected to the internet adds potentially harmful aspects of cybersecurity risk to the device profile, which could exacerbate existing risks or even introduce new ones.”
MSSPs handle secure onboarding of devices, track SBOMs to flag risky components or vendors, and apply zero-trust principles to limit what an attacker could access if a device or app is compromised. These protections are especially important for outpatient women’s health settings, where gynecological and reproductive data are prime targets for breaches. Vulnerability mappings even connect higher CVSS scores with the kinds of devices commonly used in these clinics.
Many tools in this space still run on outdated software. MSSPs help in managing firmware updates, monitoring for anomalies, and preventing device manipulation that could affect maternal care. They also provide the incident-response coordination that smaller clinics rarely have.
Radiology and imaging centers face some of the highest MSSP urgency because their PACS systems handle massive volumes of scans every day, and even a brief ransomware outage can shut down diagnostics across an entire facility. The above-mentioned study, Emerging Cybersecurity Threats in Radiation Oncology, notes that AAPM cybersecurity workgroups reveal how quickly an attack can ripple into patient care, delaying reads and disrupting clinical operations.
The study captures the scale of the problem clearly, noting that “in the last 10 years, numerous attacks have led to an interruption of radiation therapy for thousands of patients, and some of these catastrophic incidents have been described as being worse than the coronavirus disease of 2019 impact on centers in New Zealand.” That same reliance on interconnected systems applies to radiology as well, where similar technology drives imaging workflows.
Because imaging suites often sit at the crossroads of hospital networks, studies now recommend managed detection services and strong network segmentation to prevent malware from moving laterally. Radiation oncology’s experience reinforces this: frequent phishing attempts, vulnerable IoT devices, and legacy imaging viewers all increase exposure. MSSPs monitor PACS traffic in real time, handling patches for outdated viewers and aligning device safety practices with FDA expectations.
Supply chain compromises also pose risks, and MSSPs help organizations adopt threat-informed defenses that account for vendor weaknesses. Staff training on email filtering remains one of the simplest ways to prevent the initial breach, while centralized logging and shared threat intelligence improve preparedness across interconnected environments.
Pre-op planning tools, implant-tracking systems, and IoT devices in the OR all sit on hospital networks that attackers routinely test for weaknesses. As soon as these devices connect to EMRs or wireless networks, they create bidirectional data flows that allow malware and unpatched vulnerabilities to spread across systems, disrupting OR scheduling, supply chains, and even patient safety during high-volume elective procedures.
The urgency is reinforced by FDA-focused research showing that cybersecurity features barely appear in official documentation; as a BMJ Open study put it, “Among regulated devices, 13.79% were identified as including software… [yet] only 2.13% had product summaries that included cybersecurity content over the period studied.” When so few devices disclose their security posture, surgical teams inherit risks they can’t see.
MSSPs segment surgical networks, monitor endpoints in real time, and coordinate recovery when ransomware hits, mirroring the norms now standard in radiation oncology. Surgical environments prize speed and safety, but that often comes at the expense of basic cybersecurity discipline. Controls like regular patching and maintaining a software bill of materials for all third-party components remain inconsistent across many orthopedic systems, especially those still running on legacy software.
Primary care and family medicine require MSSP support to protect longitudinal patient records across diverse, high-volume populations. These specialties act as the central hubs of patient care. They need round-the-clock threat hunting and reliable compliance reporting because a single weak point can affect an entire care network.
Primary care physicians' participation in the Medicare shared savings program and preventive services delivery backs this up, including research showing that “MSSP participation was associated with an increase in the likelihood of providing influenza vaccination (0.7 percentage-points), pneumococcal vaccination (2.0 percentage-points), clinical depression screening (2.1 percentage-points), tobacco use assessment (0.3 percentage-points), and annual wellness visits (4.1 percentage-points).”
MSSPs help these organizations track quality metrics and reduce readmissions under shared-savings models, where strong physician leadership is consistently linked to better outcomes for disabled and high-risk beneficiaries. MSSP ACOs reduce inpatient use through secure data sharing. High patient volumes expose common weak spots, unsecured portals, unmanaged devices, and inconsistent authentication.
See also: HIPAA Compliant Email: The Definitive Guide (2025 Update)
Traditional IT focuses on keeping systems running, while MSSPs focus on detecting, preventing, and responding to cyber threats using specialized security platforms and continuous monitoring.
Most MSSPs provide 24/7 threat monitoring, endpoint detection and response (EDR), network and cloud security management, vulnerability scanning, log analysis, incident response, compliance reporting, and security architecture guidance.
Many MSSPs handle vulnerability scanning and patch-management workflows, but patching itself may be shared between the MSSP and internal IT based on the service contract.