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Current Allergy and Asthma Reports Nov 2018Social media services dominate online consumption of information and play an ever expanding role in our lives. They are not only used to connect with friends and family...
PURPOSE OF REVIEW
Social media services dominate online consumption of information and play an ever expanding role in our lives. They are not only used to connect with friends and family but also to educate and recruit colleagues and patients, and to stay up-to-date with the new developments in the field of allergy and immunology.
RECENT FINDINGS
There are known risks to social media user by health care professionals mostly related to breaches of patient confidentiality, professionalism, and privacy. Malpractice and liability risks have been linked to irresponsible use of social media. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the current social media tools in allergy. We recommend a pragmatic approach to maximize social media tools for the allergy practice.
Topics: Allergy and Immunology; Congresses as Topic; Education, Professional; Health Personnel; Humans; Hypersensitivity; Patient Education as Topic; Social Media
PubMed: 30430277
DOI: 10.1007/s11882-018-0822-6 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jan 2023Industry 5.0 is projected to be an exemplary improvement in digital transformation allowing for mass customization and production efficiencies using emerging... (Review)
Review
Industry 5.0 is projected to be an exemplary improvement in digital transformation allowing for mass customization and production efficiencies using emerging technologies such as universal machines, autonomous and self-driving robots, self-healing networks, cloud data analytics, etc., to supersede the limitations of Industry 4.0. To successfully pave the way for acceptance of these technologies, we must be bound and adhere to ethical and regulatory standards. Presently, with ethical standards still under development, and each region following a different set of standards and policies, the complexity of being compliant increases. Having vague and inconsistent ethical guidelines leaves potential gray areas leading to privacy, ethical, and data breaches that must be resolved. This paper examines the ethical dimensions and dilemmas associated with emerging technologies and provides potential methods to mitigate their legal/regulatory issues.
PubMed: 36772190
DOI: 10.3390/s23031151 -
Australian Journal of General Practice Jul 2022In the era of socially distanced clinical and medical research practices, the use of electronic communication has flourished. The Australian Information Commissioner...
BACKGROUND
In the era of socially distanced clinical and medical research practices, the use of electronic communication has flourished. The Australian Information Commissioner recently ordered a Victorian general practice to pay $16,400 in compensation following a breach of privacy. This is the largest award of compensation made by the Commissioner in the context of a medical or healthcare privacy matter. The practice had inadvertently sent an email containing sensitive information to an incorrect email address. The email included information concerning the human immunodeficiency virus status of the complainants.
OBJECTIVE
The aim of this article is to provide an overview of this important case in Australian information and privacy law, which relates to the operation of an Australian general practice and research activity undertaken within the practice context.
DISCUSSION
In an era marked by a great increase in the use of electronic communication in the medical setting, it is essential that practices both manage electronic communication well and respond appropriately when an error arises.
Topics: Australia; Communication; Electronics; Family Practice; Humans; Privacy
PubMed: 35773159
DOI: 10.31128/AJGP-05-21-6008 -
Current Opinion in Pediatrics Aug 2023To better understand confidentiality issues that arise from adolescent access to patient portals. (Review)
Review
PURPOSE OF REVIEW
To better understand confidentiality issues that arise from adolescent access to patient portals.
RECENT FINDINGS
Studies have evaluated the views of teens, parents, providers, and institutional leadership on adolescent patient portals and the risks they pose to adolescent privacy. Additional investigations have shown that teen portal accounts are often inappropriately accessed by parents. Guidelines are needed to better inform the creation of secure teen patient portals. Adolescent providers and other medical staff should be aware of the information available on portals, how to ensure portals are being accessed appropriately, and the potential for confidentiality breaches that come with portal use. Medical organizations that offer portal access need to provide resources to adolescents and their families to improve understanding around the importance of confidential care and how to maintain confidentiality while still engaging meaningfully with the healthcare system through patient portals.
SUMMARY
Adolescents realize the benefits portals may offer regarding improved understanding of their health conditions, communication with their providers, and autonomy in their healthcare decisions. However, confidentiality of patient portals is a major concern and a potential barrier to adolescent portal utilization. Adolescent providers should be aware of the limitations of portal systems and advocate for improved confidentiality functionality to ensure teens can access the benefits of patient portals without any harm.
Topics: Adolescent Health Services; Humans; Adolescent; Patient Portals; Confidentiality; Electronic Health Records; Parents; Legal Guardians; Information Dissemination
PubMed: 37036289
DOI: 10.1097/MOP.0000000000001252 -
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) Nov 2023With the development of mobile applications, location-based services (LBSs) have been incorporated into people's daily lives and created huge commercial revenues....
With the development of mobile applications, location-based services (LBSs) have been incorporated into people's daily lives and created huge commercial revenues. However, when using these services, people also face the risk of personal privacy breaches due to the release of location and query content. Many existing location privacy protection schemes with centralized architectures assume that anonymous servers are secure and trustworthy. This assumption is difficult to guarantee in real applications. To solve the problem of relying on the security and trustworthiness of anonymous servers, we propose a Geohash-based location privacy protection scheme for snapshot queries. It is named GLPS. On the user side, GLPS uses Geohash encoding technology to convert the user's location coordinates into a string code representing a rectangular geographic area. GLPS uses the code as the privacy location to send check-ins and queries to the anonymous server and to avoid the anonymous server gaining the user's exact location. On the anonymous server side, the scheme takes advantage of Geohash codes' geospatial gridding capabilities and GL-Tree's effective location retrieval performance to generate a -anonymous query set based on user-defined minimum and maximum hidden cells, making it harder for adversaries to pinpoint the user's location. We experimentally tested the performance of GLPS and compared it with three schemes: Casper, GCasper, and DLS. The experimental results and analyses demonstrate that GLPS has a good performance and privacy protection capability, which resolves the reliance on the security and trustworthiness of anonymous servers. It also resists attacks involving background knowledge, regional centers, homogenization, distribution density, and identity association.
PubMed: 38136449
DOI: 10.3390/e25121569 -
Biomedical Materials & Devices (New... Feb 2023Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to make substantial progress toward the goal of making healthcare more personalized, predictive, preventative, and... (Review)
Review
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to make substantial progress toward the goal of making healthcare more personalized, predictive, preventative, and interactive. We believe AI will continue its present path and ultimately become a mature and effective tool for the healthcare sector. Besides this AI-based systems raise concerns regarding data security and privacy. Because health records are important and vulnerable, hackers often target them during data breaches. The absence of standard guidelines for the moral use of AI and ML in healthcare has only served to worsen the situation. There is debate about how far artificial intelligence (AI) may be utilized ethically in healthcare settings since there are no universal guidelines for its use. Therefore, maintaining the confidentiality of medical records is crucial. This study enlightens the possible drawbacks of AI in the implementation of healthcare sector and their solutions to overcome these situations.
PubMed: 36785697
DOI: 10.1007/s44174-023-00063-2 -
Patterns (New York, N.Y.) Sep 2022In this study, we analyzed health-advertising tactics of digital medicine companies (n = 5) to evaluate varying types of cross-site-tracking middleware (n = 32) used...
In this study, we analyzed health-advertising tactics of digital medicine companies (n = 5) to evaluate varying types of cross-site-tracking middleware (n = 32) used to extract health information from users. More specifically, we examine how browsing data can be exchanged between digital medicine companies and Facebook for advertising and lead generation and advertising purposes. Our analysis focused on companies offering services to patient advocates in the cancer community who frequently engage on social media. We co-produced this study with public cancer advocates leading or participating in breast cancer groups on Facebook. Following our analysis, we raise policy questions about what constitutes a health privacy breach based on existing federal laws such as the Health Breach Notification Rule and The HIPAA Privacy Rule. We discuss how these common marketing practices enable surveillance and targeting of medical ads to vulnerable patient populations without consent.
PubMed: 36124307
DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2022.100561 -
NPJ Digital Medicine 2020The lack of interoperability in Britain's medical records systems precludes the realisation of benefits generated by increased spending elsewhere in healthcare. Growing... (Review)
Review
The lack of interoperability in Britain's medical records systems precludes the realisation of benefits generated by increased spending elsewhere in healthcare. Growing concerns regarding the security of online medical data following breaches, and regarding regulations governing data ownership, mandate strict parameters in the development of efficient methods to administrate medical records. Furthermore, consideration must be placed on the rise of connected devices, which vastly increase the amount of data that can be collected in order to improve a patient's long-term health outcomes. Increasing numbers of healthcare systems are developing Blockchain-based systems to manage medical data. A Blockchain is a decentralised, continuously growing online ledger of records, validated by members of the network. Traditionally used to manage cryptocurrency records, distributed ledger technology can be applied to various aspects of healthcare. In this manuscript, we focus on how Electronic Medical Records in particular can be managed by Blockchain, and how the introduction of this novel technology can create a more efficient and interoperable infrastructure to manage records that leads to improved healthcare outcomes, while maintaining patient data ownership and without compromising privacy or security of sensitive data.
PubMed: 31934645
DOI: 10.1038/s41746-019-0211-0 -
Neurologic Clinics Aug 2023Advances in electronic health record technology, the ever-expanding use of social media, and cybersecurity sabotage threaten patient privacy and render physicians and... (Review)
Review
Advances in electronic health record technology, the ever-expanding use of social media, and cybersecurity sabotage threaten patient privacy and render physicians and health care organizations liable for violating federal and state laws. Violating a patient's privacy is both an ethical and legal breach with potentially serious legal and reputational consequences. Even an unintentional Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) violation can result in financial penalties and reputational harm. Staying complaint with HIPAA requires vigilance on the part of both individuals with legitimate access to protected health information (PHI) and the organizations handling that PHI.
Topics: United States; Humans; Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; Privacy; Social Media; Confidentiality
PubMed: 37407103
DOI: 10.1016/j.ncl.2023.03.007 -
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health... Dec 2022Federated learning methods offer secured monitor services and privacy-preserving paradigms to end-users and organisations in the Internet of Things networks such as...
Federated learning methods offer secured monitor services and privacy-preserving paradigms to end-users and organisations in the Internet of Things networks such as smart healthcare systems. Federated learning has been coined to safeguard sensitive data, and its global aggregation is often based on a centralised server. This design is vulnerable to malicious attacks and could be breached by privacy attacks such as inference and free-riding, leading to inefficient training models. Besides, uploaded analysing parameters by patients can reveal private information and the threat of direct manipulation by the central server. To address these issues, we present a three-fold Federated Edge Aggregator, the so-called Edge Intelligence, a federated learning-based privacy protection framework for safeguarding Smart Healthcare Systems at the edge against such privacy attacks. We employ an iteration-based Conventional Neural Network (CNN) model and artificial noise functions to balance privacy protection and model performance. A theoretical convergence bound of Edge Intelligence on the trained federated learning model's loss function is also introduced here. We evaluate and compare the proposed framework with the recently established methods using model performance and privacy budget on popular and recent datasets: MNIST, CIFAR10, STL10, and COVID19 chest x-ray. Finally, the proposed framework achieves 90% accuracy and a high privacy rate demonstrating better performance than the baseline technique.
Topics: Humans; Privacy; COVID-19; Fenbendazole; Intelligence; Internet
PubMed: 35857737
DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3192648