Trust Requirements in E-Health System: A Conceptual Framework

Resulting from the development of new technology, conventional scientific practices have migrated into computer-based infrastructures, called e-science. Specifically, escience applied in health discipline is called e-health. It is an organized system that deals to diagnose and treat patients. Considering trust is an important role and fundamental for the provision of effective healthcare service, this paper discusses trust requirement in e-health. To highlight the importance of trust in e-health system, a conceptual framework of trust requirements in e-health system is developed. Drawn from literature search framed by STARLITE, a conceptual framework that addresses trust resulting from relationships of various actors based on two perspectives: sociotechnical and technical perspectives are presented. This framework suggests that e-health system must build a trust relationship between actors and understand trust based on sociotechnical and technical perspectives. Further, security and privacy that protect the confidentiality of patient’s data, especially m-health (mobile health) also need trust in resource sharing. It can be concluded that trust requirements in e-health depend on how the media transmits a social experience, patient-system relationship, and collaboration of software engineering and healthcare professionals. The implementation of trust requirements has the potential to produce well-engineered software in a healthcare organization, resulting in the use of software for effective diagnosis and treatment of patients

Trust-based specification of sociotechnical systems

Current approaches in sociotechnical systems consider trust to be either cognitive—referring to actors' mental models of each other—or technical—referring to an actor's trust of a technical artifact. In this paper, we take a more expansive view of trust: in addition to the cognitive, we also consider trust in the architectural sense, which we term sociotechnical trust. Broadly, sociotechnical trust applies at the level of roles. Our principal claim is that sociotechnical systems are essentially specified in terms of sociotechnical trust. Whereas previous work has considered dependencies between actors as a fundamental social relation, we claim that no dependency can exist without the corresponding sociotechnical trust. Our contributions are threefold. One, we qualitatively show sociotechnical trust to be different from cognitive and technical trust and the prevalent notions of dependencies among actors. Two, we specify a conceptual model of systems based on sociotechnical trust. We introduce the novel idea of one trust relation supporting another, which enables us to compare sociotechnical systems for trustworthiness. Three, we specify a methodology for engineering trustworthy sociotechnical systems. We evaluate our approach by modeling some aspects of a European food safety legislation