Jorge Acevedo Canabal, M.D., is a Visiting Scholar at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop where he leads research on documenting and classifying cyber-induced patient harm. His work develops external cause codes for ICD classification systems to enable epidemiological surveillance of cyber-related patient harm, positioning cybersecurity incidents as technological hazards within public health infrastructure.  

Dr. Acevedo Canabal completed his medical degree magna cum laude at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine. He previously served as Chief Medical Director at the Puerto Rico Public Health Trust and is medical advisor to the Biohacking Village.  

Digital infrastructure failures are increasingly recognized as technological hazards, yet international clinical documentation still lacks standardized external cause codes for technology-mediated patient harm – whether from cyberattacks, accidental failures, or environmental outages.

As healthcare systems rely on connected critical infrastructure, collaboration with technology and cybersecurity experts is essential to understand the impact on human health. Peer-reviewed studies already link ransomware attacks, power grid failures, and climate-induced outages with measurable patient harm and healthcare disruptions.

This workshop explored how adapting disaster-related harm attribution frameworks – prioritizing association over causality – can capture harm from malicious cyber-incidents, accidental failures, environmental disruptions, and cascading technological failures.