50,026 research outputs found
Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users
Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users
Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users
Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users
Going Rogue: Mobile Research Applications and the Right to Privacy
This Article investigates whether nonsectoral state laws may serve as a viable source of privacy and security standards for mobile health research participants and other health data subjects until new federal laws are created or enforced. In particular, this Article (1) catalogues and analyzes the nonsectoral data privacy, security, and breach notification statutes of all fifty states and the District of Columbia; (2) applies these statutes to mobile-app-mediated health research conducted by independent scientists, citizen scientists, and patient researchers; and (3) proposes substantive amendments to state law that could help protect the privacy and security of all health data subjects, including mobile-app-mediated health research participants
Recommended from our members
Disposition toward privacy and information disclosure in the context of emerging health technologies.
ObjectiveWe sought to present a model of privacy disposition and its development based on qualitative research on privacy considerations in the context of emerging health technologies.Materials and methodsWe spoke to 108 participants across 44 interviews and 9 focus groups to understand the range of ways in which individuals value (or do not value) control over their health information. Transcripts of interviews and focus groups were systematically coded and analyzed in ATLAS.ti for privacy considerations expressed by respondents.ResultsThree key findings from the qualitative data suggest a model of privacy disposition. First, participants described privacy related behavior as both contextual and habitual. Second, there are motivations for and deterrents to sharing personal information that do not fit into the analytical categories of risks and benefits. Third, philosophies of privacy, often described as attitudes toward privacy, should be classified as a subtype of motivation or deterrent.DiscussionThis qualitative analysis suggests a simple but potentially powerful conceptual model of privacy disposition, or what makes a person more or less private. Components of privacy disposition are identifiable and measurable through self-report and therefore amenable to operationalization and further quantitative inquiry.ConclusionsWe propose this model as the basis for a psychometric instrument that can be used to identify types of privacy dispositions, with potential applications in research, clinical practice, system design, and policy
Equity in the Digital Age: How Health Information Technology Can Reduce Disparities
While enormous medical and technological advancements have been made over the last century, it is only very recently that there have been similar rates of development in the field of health information technology (HIT).This report examines some of the advancements in HIT and its potential to shape the future health care experiences of consumers. Combined with better data collection, HIT offers signi?cant opportunities to improve access to care, enhance health care quality, and create targeted strategies that help promote health equity. We must also keep in mind that technology gaps exist, particularly among communities of color, immigrants, and people who do not speak English well. HIT implementation must be done in a manner that responds to the needs of all populations to make sure that it enhances access, facilitates enrollment, and improves quality in a way that does not exacerbate existing health disparities for the most marginalized and underserved
Electronic health records to facilitate clinical research
Electronic health records (EHRs) provide opportunities to enhance patient care, embed performance measures in clinical practice, and facilitate clinical research. Concerns have been raised about the increasing recruitment challenges in trials, burdensome and obtrusive data collection, and uncertain generalizability of the results. Leveraging electronic health records to counterbalance these trends is an area of intense interest. The initial applications of electronic health records, as the primary data source is envisioned for observational studies, embedded pragmatic or post-marketing registry-based randomized studies, or comparative effectiveness studies. Advancing this approach to randomized clinical trials, electronic health records may potentially be used to assess study feasibility, to facilitate patient recruitment, and streamline data collection at baseline and follow-up. Ensuring data security and privacy, overcoming the challenges associated with linking diverse systems and maintaining infrastructure for repeat use of high quality data, are some of the challenges associated with using electronic health records in clinical research. Collaboration between academia, industry, regulatory bodies, policy makers, patients, and electronic health record vendors is critical for the greater use of electronic health records in clinical research. This manuscript identifies the key steps required to advance the role of electronic health records in cardiovascular clinical research
INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS OF COMPARATIVE GOVERNMENT REGULATION FOR THE PROTECTION AND PRIVACY OF HEALTH DATA IN THE CLOUD
This research is a comparative study of the institutional effects of regulatory and compliance issues surrounding cloud computing in healthcare. Our focus is on health care organizations and the IT industry, and how these two important stakeholders interpret and apply the privacy and security rules from the U.S. and EU. As an institutional environment, healthcare is experiencing coercive, normative and mimetic isomorphic pressures on macro, meso and micro levels. International governments are seeking ways to build capacity in the cloud computing market, yet they are faced with difficult issues in relation to privacy and security of personal data. Our findings suggest that regulatory and compliance is being developed ‘in response to’ rather than ‘in anticipation of’ technical change. Normative pressures to encourage healthcare organizations to develop effective data protection and privacy policies to comply with new regulatory change are further complicated in an environment where cloud data may be transferred across different legal and regulatory jurisdictions. Our findings show that healthcare organizations and cloud providers need to work more closely together as business associates. However, translating HIPAA and EU rules and regulations into practice is thwarted by a lack of legal and regulatory knowledge, particularly in the smaller organizations
Recommended from our members
Privacy-preserving model learning on a blockchain network-of-networks.
ObjectiveTo facilitate clinical/genomic/biomedical research, constructing generalizable predictive models using cross-institutional methods while protecting privacy is imperative. However, state-of-the-art methods assume a "flattened" topology, while real-world research networks may consist of "network-of-networks" which can imply practical issues including training on small data for rare diseases/conditions, prioritizing locally trained models, and maintaining models for each level of the hierarchy. In this study, we focus on developing a hierarchical approach to inherit the benefits of the privacy-preserving methods, retain the advantages of adopting blockchain, and address practical concerns on a research network-of-networks.Materials and methodsWe propose a framework to combine level-wise model learning, blockchain-based model dissemination, and a novel hierarchical consensus algorithm for model ensemble. We developed an example implementation HierarchicalChain (hierarchical privacy-preserving modeling on blockchain), evaluated it on 3 healthcare/genomic datasets, as well as compared its predictive correctness, learning iteration, and execution time with a state-of-the-art method designed for flattened network topology.ResultsHierarchicalChain improves the predictive correctness for small training datasets and provides comparable correctness results with the competing method with higher learning iteration and similar per-iteration execution time, inherits the benefits of the privacy-preserving learning and advantages of blockchain technology, and immutable records models for each level.DiscussionHierarchicalChain is independent of the core privacy-preserving learning method, as well as of the underlying blockchain platform. Further studies are warranted for various types of network topology, complex data, and privacy concerns.ConclusionWe demonstrated the potential of utilizing the information from the hierarchical network-of-networks topology to improve prediction
On the Use of XML in Medical Imaging Web-Based Applications
The rapid growth of digital technology in medical fields over recent years has increased the need for applications able to manage patient medical records, imaging data, and chart information. Web-based applications are implemented with the purpose to link digital databases, storage and transmission protocols, management of large volumes of data and security concepts, allowing the possibility to read, analyze, and even diagnose remotely from the medical center where the information was acquired. The objective of this paper is to analyze the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) language in web-based applications that aid in diagnosis or treatment of patients, considering how this protocol allows indexing and exchanging the huge amount of information associated with each medical case. The purpose of this paper is to point out the main advantages and drawbacks of the XML technology in order to provide key ideas for future web-based applicationsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
- …