Accountable-eHealth Systems: The Next Step Forward for Privacy

Abstract

eHealth systems promise enviable benefits and capabilities for healthcare delivery. However, the technologies that make these capabilities possible introduce undesirable drawback such as information security related threats, which need to be appropriately addressed. Lurking in these threats are information privacy concerns. Fulfilling them has proven to be difficult because they often conflict with information access requirements of healthcare providers. Therefore, it is important to achieve an appropriate balance between these requirements. We contend that information accountability (IA) can achieve this balance. In this paper, we introduce accountable-eHealth (AeH) systems, which are eHealth systems that utilise IA as a measure of information privacy. We discuss how AeH system protocols can successfully achieve the aforementioned balance of requirements. As a means of implementation feasibility, we compare characteristics of AeH systems with Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system and identify similarities and highlight the differences and the impact those differences would have to the eHealth domain.