Social Media in the Dental School Environment, Part A: Benefits, Challenges, and Recommendations for Use

Social media consist of powerful tools that impact not only communication but relationships among people, thus posing an inherent challenge to the traditional standards of who we are as dental educators and what we can expect of each other. This article examines how the world of social media has changed dental education. Its goal is to outline the complex issues that social media use presents for academic dental institutions and to examine these issues from personal, professional, and legal perspectives. After providing an update on social media, the article considers the advantages and risks associated with the use of social media at the interpersonal, professional, and institutional levels. Policies and legal issues of which academic dental institutions need to be aware from a compliance perspective are examined, along with considerations and resources needed to develop effective social media policies. The challenge facing dental educators is how to capitalize on the benefits that social media offer, while minimizing risks and complying with the various forms of legal constraint

Utilization Efficacy Perceptions of Telepractice for Speech-Language Pathologists and University Faculty and Administrators: A Qualitative Delphi Study

Telepractice (or telehealth, teletherapy, tele-rehabilitation) is becoming more common. Speech-language pathology entered the world of telemedicine later than other fields of medicine. With the increasing size of the aging population with the baby boomers, the need for speech-language pathology can be achieved through practitioners using telepractice. Despite the need, barriers such as reimbursement, licensing, privacy and confidentiality, technology and technology acceptance are hindering the adoption of telepractice. This study uses the Delphi methodology with qualitative data collection and analysis to come to a consensus on how to best regulate and operate telepractice with speech-language pathology so that it is more readily adopted. The panel of 11 experts were identified and organized into three groups: 6 speech-language pathologists working with adult and geriatric patients, 2 regulatory experts, and 3 university speech-language pathology program faculty and administrators. The Delphi method was used in multiple rounds to collect data on the barriers to telepractice, as well as potential solutions. Rounds included: individual semi-structured interviews (barriers, training and curriculum, technology acceptance and use, HIPAA compliance), statements from data collected in previous rounds, where participants made additional comments and voted, and final presentation of results to participants. During this final round results and solutions were presented, , as well as suggestions for technology training options to speech-language pathologists

Analysis of the Adherence of mHealth Applications to HIPAA Technical Safeguards

The proliferation of mobile health technology, or mHealth apps, has made it essential to protect individual health details. People now have easy access to digital platforms that allow them to save, share, and access their medical data and treatment information as well as easily monitor and manage health-related issues. It is crucial to make sure that protected health information (PHI) is effectively and securely transmitted, received, created, and maintained in accordance with the rules outlined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as the use of mHealth apps increases. Unfortunately, many mobile app developers, particularly those of mHealth apps, do not completely understand the HIPAA security and privacy requirements. This offers a unique opportunity for research to create an analytical framework that can help programmers maintain safe and HIPAA-compliant source code while also educating users about the security and privacy of private health information. The plan is to develop a framework which will serve as the foundation for developing an integrated development environment (IDE) plugin for mHealth app developers and a web-based interface for mHealth app consumers. This will help developers identify and address HIPAA compliance issues during the development process and provide consumers with a tool to evaluate the privacy and security of mHealth apps before downloading and using them. The goal is to encourage the development of secure and compliant mHealth apps that safeguard personal health information

Equivalence-based Security for Querying Encrypted Databases: Theory and Application to Privacy Policy Audits

Motivated by the problem of simultaneously preserving confidentiality and usability of data outsourced to third-party clouds, we present two different database encryption schemes that largely hide data but reveal enough information to support a wide-range of relational queries. We provide a security definition for database encryption that captures confidentiality based on a notion of equivalence of databases from the adversary's perspective. As a specific application, we adapt an existing algorithm for finding violations of privacy policies to run on logs encrypted under our schemes and observe low to moderate overheads.Comment: CCS 2015 paper technical report, in progres

HIPAA Compliant Patient-Provider Communication: Student-Clinician Perceptions

Purpose: To evaluate the service learning clinical training facility’s HIPAA training by assessing student-clinician knowledge of the clinic’s HIPAA Compliance Plan and the impact of its training on student-clinician perceptions toward HIPAA-compliant patient-provider communication (PPC). For example, do student-clinicians feel it is important to be HIPAA-compliant and are they confident in discussing health-related activities and programs with patients or caregivers? The purpose of this project is not, at this time, to measure student-clinician intention to perform the behavior. Methods: This project employed a mixed-methods, non-experimental cross-sectional study design using a retrospective post-test survey and group interview. The survey was administered to student-clinicians (N = 39) at the service learning clinical training facility who were enrolled in the speech-language pathology and audiology programs. Survey responses were analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test and descriptive statistics assessing knowledge. A group interview was conducted with a subset of first-year student-clinicians (n = 2). The group interview provided additional context and insight into how student-clinicians may actually perform when presented with the most common clinical scenarios for PPC at the clinic such as, 1) caregivers accompanying clients into the exam room, 2) email communication with a caregiver requesting information to assist the client, and 3) communication with a client in a public space. Common themes and the most common responses for each scenario were identified. Results: Overall, the Wilcoxon-signed rank test showed that the clinic’s HIPAA training produces a statistically significant improvement in student clinician perception six months post training as it relates to HIPAA-compliant PPC through analysis of perceptions toward self-efficacy (Z = -4.814, p Recommendations: 1) Based on the findings of the service learning activities and the evaluation, implementation of HIPAA training sessions periodically throughout the academic year in addition to continuation of the current annual training session should be completed. 2) Further evaluation of the clinic’s workforce in relation to behavioral intention to complete HIPAA-compliant PPC should be completed through replication of the evaluation using a traditional pre-post survey administered immediately before, after and 6 months post annual training. 3) The Clinic should implement electronic forms to assist the workforce when reporting a breach in HIPAA privacy. An electronic reporting process might enable a greater sense of one’s ability to perform a behavior while increasing confidentiality of the reporter

A Systematic Review of Research Studies Examining Telehealth Privacy and Security Practices Used By Healthcare Providers

The objective of this systematic review was to systematically review papers in the United States that examine current practices in privacy and security when telehealth technologies are used by healthcare providers. A literature search was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols (PRISMA-P). PubMed, CINAHL and INSPEC from 2003 – 2016 were searched and returned 25,404 papers (after duplications were removed). Inclusion and exclusion criteria were strictly followed to examine title, abstract, and full text for 21 published papers which reported on privacy and security practices used by healthcare providers using telehealth.  Data on confidentiality, integrity, privacy, informed consent, access control, availability, retention, encryption, and authentication were all searched and retrieved from the papers examined. Papers were selected by two independent reviewers, first per inclusion/exclusion criteria and, where there was disagreement, a third reviewer was consulted. The percentage of agreement and Cohen’s kappa was 99.04% and 0.7331 respectively. The papers reviewed ranged from 2004 to 2016 and included several types of telehealth specialties. Sixty-seven percent were policy type studies, and 14 percent were survey/interview studies. There were no randomized controlled trials. Based upon the results, we conclude that it is necessary to have more studies with specific information about the use of privacy and security practices when using telehealth technologies as well as studies that examine patient and provider preferences on how data is kept private and secure during and after telehealth sessions.Keywords: Computer security, Health personnel, Privacy, Systematic review, Telehealth

Optimized trusted information sharing

As the digital world expands the building of trust and the retention of privacy in information sharing becomes paramount. A major impediment to information sharing is a lack of trust between the parties, based on security and privacy concerns, as well as information asymmetry. Several technological solutions have been proposed to solve this problem, including our\u27s: a trusted enclave with a Continuous Compliance Assurance (CCA) mechanism. Of the work surrounding these proposed solutions, no attention has been directed toward studying the issues of performance surrounding processing of this nature. Studies have shown that ignoring the performance of a system can lead to ineffectiveness (i.e. disabling certain features), and can be severely detrimental to system adoption.;To ensure that our trusted enclave and CCA mechanism are viable solutions to the trusted information sharing problem, we have built a prototype CCA mechanism and a test bed. The test bed has allowed us to identify problem areas within our prototype. One such area is compliance verification, which utilizes the XPath language in order to test XML encoded information for compliance to regulatory and corporate policies. The compliance verification problem can be described as the answering of multiple queries over a single XML document. We proposed and tested multiple state-of-the-art algorithmic as well as system-based improvements to XPath evaluation, in order to better the overall performance of this aspect of our system. We integrated each of the improvements into our prototype mechanism and have observed the results. Our experiments have taught us much about the problem of compliance verification, and has led us in new directions as we continue to search for a solution