Wk 4 Individual: Technology Trends Proposal Part 3

Technology Trends: Privacy Risks, Security Safeguards, and Evaluation Strategies

Stephanie Williams

10/04/2021

Though Telehealth has brought a lot of benefits such as convenience, improved patient care, and monitoring of the patient after recovery, it has introduced significant privacy and security risks to patients. IoT devices are used to enable Telehealth, they collect personal data from patients (Hall et al., 2018). For instance, patients implanted with sensors end up picking non-medical information as well. This sensor might pick activities that the patient engages in like interacting with family, they can tell the location of the patient and other activities which the patient is doing, all of which in normal circumstances the patient might not be willing to disclose.

Data collected by IoT devices in Telemedicine can be also be stored by not only the health provider but also the application or device manufacturer. Such data could be sold to the dark web or third parties for “targeted advertising or for medical fraud”. Many patients give consent about how their information would be collected, stored by the health provider but in most cases the patients do not understand whatever they consent to in those privacy policies (Márquez, 2020). Some patients also do not read those privacy policies before they agree thus resulting in weak privacy protection. Another security risk is that patients do not have full control of data held by Telehealth providers

During this period of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is the rapid development of IoT devices used in Telehealth has led to the emergence of privacy and security issues. Security is not being given prominence in the development of application and robotic devices used in Telemedicine(Márquez, 2020). To compound the problem further, HIPAA non-compliance with privacy regulations during the pandemic has been waived thus Telehealth providers will not be penalized for using conventional video conferencing tools to communicate with patients. Loosening HIPAA regulations exposes patients during the Covid-19 pandemic to security and privacy risks. During the pandemic, medical professionals are being encouraged to work from home and further allowing them to use their own devices to attend to patients. While attending to patients, medical professionals working from home use various devices such as tablets, computers, and cellphones for communication (Hall et al., 2018). Information saved on those devices increases chances of a data breach, insecure connection, and lack of transparency in the public network may cause health systems to be prone to cyber-attacks.

To effectively use Telehealth systems, medical professionals should be trained on cyber security. Further, information held in IoT devices should be encrypted to prevent security breaches (Hall et al., 2018). Additionally, Telehealth providers should develop a remote working policy as part of an information security strategy.

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