Cybersecurity Risks in Digital Pharmacy Systems: Protecting Electronic Prescriptions and Clinical Data

Abstract

Digital pharmacy systems have become foundational components of modern healthcare delivery, enabling electronic prescriptions, automated medication management, and seamless clinical data exchange across interoperable health information infrastructures. As dependence on these systems accelerates, cybersecurity risks have expanded in both scale and complexity, exposing sensitive prescription data, patient identifiers, and clinical records to a growing landscape of threats. Cyberattacks including ransomware, data interception, system intrusion, credential compromise, and API manipulation have increasingly targeted digital pharmacy workflows, exploiting vulnerabilities in electronic prescription platforms, cloud-hosted pharmacy management software, IoT-enabled dispensing systems, and telepharmacy services. These risks threaten not only data confidentiality but also medication safety, continuity of care, and the operational resilience of national healthcare services. This paper examines the evolving cybersecurity challenges inherent in digital pharmacy ecosystems, evaluates the technical and organizational vulnerabilities across prescription-generation, transmission, verification, and dispensing stages, and analyzes how inadequate encryption, weak authentication, interoperability weaknesses, and misconfigured health IT infrastructures contribute to systemic exposure. The study argues that effective protection of electronic prescriptions and clinical data requires a multi-layered defense strategy integrating advanced cryptographic safeguards, AI-driven anomaly detection, regulatory compliance frameworks, zero-trust architectures, and continuous workforce cybersecurity training to ensure safe, resilient, and trustworthy digital pharmacy operations.