How Institutional Leaders in Healthcare and Education Are Responding to an Escalating Threat Environment
April 22, 2026
1:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM CT / 10:00 AM PT / 6:00 PM GMT
Duration: 1 hour
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A certificate of attendance will be offered.
Summary
The threat landscape facing healthcare organizations and educational institutions is intensifying and becoming increasingly complex, posing a challenge to traditional security models. Hospitals, health systems, K-12 districts, and higher-education campuses all operate mission-critical environments where physical safety, cybersecurity, operational continuity, and public trust are inseparably linked. In both sectors, security failures carry immediate human, reputational, and regulatory consequences.
Healthcare organizations face a uniquely high-stakes risk environment shaped by patient safety, clinical uptime, and regulatory mandates. They are prime targets for cybercriminals seeking sensitive patient data, ransomware leverage, and operational disruption. At the same time, physical threats are escalating, including workplace violence against clinicians and staff, unauthorized access to facilities, insider risk, and vulnerabilities across sprawling hospital campuses and outpatient networks—often compounded by staffing shortages, aging infrastructure, and rapid digitization of clinical systems and medical devices.
Educational institutions, ranging from K-12 schools to large university campuses, face a parallel but distinct set of challenges. Campus security leaders must protect open, community-oriented environments while addressing rising concerns around violence, unauthorized access, cyberattacks, and threats targeting students, faculty, and staff. Schools and universities are increasingly targeted by ransomware, data theft, and social engineering attacks, while also managing physical risks tied to large public gatherings, aging facilities, decentralized campuses, and limited resources.
As cyber and physical threats converge across both sectors, security leaders are being forced to rethink siloed, perimeter-based approaches. Linear, reactive security models are giving way to integrated, intelligence-driven frameworks that emphasize real-time visibility, cross-functional collaboration, and resilience across physical security, IT, operations, and leadership teams. In both healthcare and education, security must enable mission delivery—care and learning—without creating friction or disruption.
Today’s healthcare CSOs and campus security executives are increasingly expected to operate as enterprise risk leaders. They advise executive leadership, coordinate across clinical, academic, IT, and facilities teams, and align security strategy with safety, continuity, compliance, and institutional trust. Success depends on the effective use of data, analytics, and automation to anticipate threats, accelerate response, and reduce risk across complex, distributed environments.
This live web event will explore how healthcare and school/campus security leaders are adapting to an escalating threat environment, sharing practical insights on protecting people, data, and mission-critical operations while maintaining openness, accessibility, and resilience.
Topics for Discussion
- The rise of workplace and campus violence, and strategies to protect staff, patients, students, and visitors
- Cyber threats targeting healthcare and educational institutions, including ransomware, data breaches, and system disruption
- Managing cyber-physical convergence across hospitals, campuses, and distributed facilities
- Leveraging AI, automation, and analytics to improve threat detection, incident response, and operational resilience
- How healthcare CSOs and campus security leaders can elevate security as a strategic function aligned with safety, continuity, and institutional mission
Speakers
Michael Niola
Principal and Co-founder
The Consulting Group
Michael Niola is a security design and consulting professional specializing in integrated physical security and technology systems for healthcare, higher education, and other mission-critical environments. He leads multidisciplinary teams in delivering security strategies that enhance safety, protect sensitive data, and support operational resilience.
As co-founder of The Consulting Group, Mike has built a firm around the belief that security should be integrated, not isolated. His team focuses on embedding security within architecture in ways that facilitate operations and enhance the user experience from the earliest stages of design. This approach bridges gaps between disciplines, reduces friction during implementation, and results in solutions that deliver value to stakeholders beyond security alone.
Drew Neckar, MBA, CPP
Principal Consultant
COSECURE
Drew has served in senior security executive roles in the nightclub, healthcare, and higher education industries including serving as a Regional Director for Mayo Clinic and the Chief Security Officer for ECMC Group a company operating subsidiaries in multiple sectors including sixty-eight career college and charter school campuses throughout the US. In 2018 Drew stepped away from in-house security management to devote himself to consulting, and opened Security Advisors Consulting Group, a consulting firm concentrating on security management and forensic security consulting. In 2024 the Security Advisors was acquired by COSECURE Enterprise Risk Solutions and Drew now serves as the Principal Consultant for COSECURE.
Eric Polovich
Director of Sales Operations
Omnilert
Eric Polovich, Director of sales operations at Omnilert, has nearly two decades of experience in safety technology deployments and more than 25 years in SAS solutions. He has played a key role in implementing emergency communication platforms and is a subject matter expert on Omnilert’s Gun Detect.
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