Recommendation for Managing Patients’ Privacy in an Integrated Health Information Network

Abstract

The application of emerging digital technologies has grown rapidly and received wide acceptance worldwide. These digital technologies have spread to cover many disciplines and sectors in our lives. One of these is the health sector. Health-information technology, such as sophisticated electronic health records, has the potential to improve health care. At the start of implementation of these technologies in the health sector, its adaptation was very slow by physicians; but it’s starting to have some adaptation in countries like USA, Australia, UK, and some of the other countries like Malaysia. Although, health records have widely been used in many countries, it comes with some important issues that have to be tackled. Ethical standardization is an example of these issues, in particular, patients’ data privacy. Failing to develop privacy policies and legislations that can protect the patients’ data privacy in the e-health sector may minimize the effectiveness of the implementations of these systems in the health sector and; therefore, decrease the value perception of these systems. The main aim of this paper is to propose patients’ privacy recommendations to try and create a trust between patients and these systems, based on a questionnaire that will be delivered to 40 family members and friends to explore some patients’ privacy concerns.