Introduction
Healthcare data can retain sensitivity for decades, while clinical environments depend on a complex mix of applications, devices, imaging systems and interoperability standards. QSD research focuses on how quantum-safe transition can protect confidentiality and trust without disrupting patient care or medical-device safety.
2026 Research Context
Healthcare combines exceptionally long confidentiality requirements with complex procurement and device lifecycles. ENISA’s July 2026 procurement guidance for hospitals reinforces the importance of embedding cybersecurity objectives across the full procurement lifecycle—a principle that is directly relevant to future PQC requirements in medical devices, clinical platforms, identity, imaging and data exchange. For research, the key question is how to introduce crypto-agility without destabilising safety-critical workflows, while ensuring that long-lived patient data and trust services are not trapped behind vendor or firmware constraints.
Research Focus
- PQC readiness for patient-data encryption and long-term confidentiality
- DICOM, HL7/FHIR and API trust dependencies
- Medical-device identity, firmware signing and update integrity
- Hospital PKI and certificate lifecycle migration
- Supplier and lifecycle constraints for regulated devices
Expected Research Outputs
- Healthcare crypto-dependency models
- Clinical-system migration patterns
- Device and supplier readiness criteria
- Reference playbooks for high-availability environments
- Q-TR healthcare readiness indicators
Standards & Sector Context
GDPR · MDR context · NIS2 where applicable · NIST PQC standards
Collaboration Model
QSD collaborates with healthcare providers, medical-device manufacturers, digital-health platforms and research organisations that can contribute clinical interoperability, device-lifecycle or patient-data use cases. Research can be structured around non-production testbeds, protocol analysis, firmware-signing scenarios and long-term confidentiality requirements.