Overview
ISO/TS 6268-1:2025 - Health informatics - Cybersecurity framework for telehealth environments - Part 1: Overview and concepts, is the first edition Technical Specification that defines the conceptual foundation for telehealth cybersecurity. It frames the overall cybersecurity framework for systems and services used in telehealth, explains core definitions and terminology, and outlines the structure of the full framework series (Parts 2 and 3). This document is intended as a baseline for understanding telehealth security risks, actor interactions, and the variables that influence cybersecurity posture across distributed care environments.
Key topics and scope
ISO/TS 6268-1:2025 covers high-level concepts rather than prescriptive controls. Major topics include:
- Concept and introduction to telehealth cybersecurity - rationale, scope and unique challenges of non-face-to-face healthcare delivery.
- Actors of telehealth services - care recipients, caregivers, healthcare actors, telehealth platform providers, service providers and recipients.
- Activities of telehealth services - synchronous and asynchronous interactions (teleconsultation, remote monitoring, tele-diagnostics, etc.).
- Environments of telehealth services - physical and IT contexts (homes, clinics, ambulances, cloud/mobile infrastructures) that affect security levels.
- Variables of telehealth security - differences in cybersecurity posture across actors, policy inheritance, device integration and lifecycle considerations.
- Terminology and definitions - harmonized terms to support consistent communication across health informatics and cybersecurity stakeholders.
Note: Part 1 is conceptual; Part 2 provides a cybersecurity reference model and Part 3 will specify requirements.
Practical applications
ISO/TS 6268-1:2025 is useful for organizations that need to design, evaluate or govern secure telehealth services:
- Use it to align organizational understanding of telehealth risk drivers before applying technical controls.
- Support risk assessment and threat modeling by clarifying actor interactions, data flows and environment-dependent variables.
- Inform policy development and governance for telehealth programs to account for cross-environment security gaps.
- Guide procurement and platform selection, ensuring vendors address the contextual security differences between users (home, clinic, mobile).
- Help integrate medical device safety considerations with cybersecurity risk management for remote care scenarios.
Who should use this standard
- Telehealth platform providers and vendors
- Healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) and clinicians implementing remote services
- Health IT and cybersecurity teams
- Medical device manufacturers integrating devices into telehealth workflows
- Regulators and policy-makers developing telehealth security guidance
Related standards
ISO/TS 6268-1 references and aligns conceptually with other health informatics and device standards such as:
- ISO 13131 (telehealth), ISO 81001-1 (health software safety/cybersecurity), ISO 13485 (medical device), and ISO/IEC standards for platform and terminology alignment.
Keywords: ISO/TS 6268-1:2025, telehealth cybersecurity, health informatics, cybersecurity framework, telemedicine security, telehealth standards.