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Privacy and Security Concerns in Telehealth

2014; American Medical Association; Volume: 16; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1001/virtualmentor.2014.16.12.jdsc1-1412

2376-6980

Timothy M. Hale, Joseph C. Kvedar,

Patient-Provider Communication in Healthcare

Innovative connected health technologies offer a promising solution to many of the challenges facing health care delivery in the United States.Connected health refers to a wide range of care delivery models that utilize communications technologies (sometimes referred to as telehealth and telemedicine) to help patients manage their conditions through improved self-care and to extend clinical care outside of traditional settings [1].Health care systems that combine patient-reported information and objective data from telehealth devices and sensors can be used to create patient-centered, personalized health interventions.Although these new technologies promise to improve the quality of care, reduce costs, and increase patient satisfaction, they raise a number of ethical issues.Hall and McGraw argue that there are significant privacy and security risks in telehealth systems that can adversely affect patients' and clinicians' level of trust and willingness to adopt and use the system [2].Noting that current regulations do not provide sufficient guidance for developers or protection for users, the authors recommend that a single federal agency, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), coordinate the creation and enforcement of comprehensive privacy and security standards.In what follows, we summarize Hall and McGraw's key points and then discuss their implications based on our experience in creating, evaluating, and implementing telehealth systems.Hall and McGraw begin by describing the risks that telehealth systems pose to the privacy and security of patients' health information.Privacy risks involve a lack of control over the collection, use, and sharing of data.For example, home telehealth devices and sensors designed to detect falls may collect and transmit information on activities in the household that a patient wishes to keep private, such as substance abuse or that the house is unoccupied at particular time.Smartphone apps may share sensitive data-such as sensor data on location-with advertisers and other third parties in ways not anticipated by users.The primary security risk is that of unauthorized access to data during collection, transmission, or storage.Any transfer offers the potential for a security breach.The authors argue that, despite efforts to create secure devices and apps, many contain serious flaws, and hackers and malware pose an increasing threat to the security of telehealth systems.