Randike Gajanayake

Sharing with Care: An Information Accountability Perspective

Health information sharing has become a vital part of modern healthcare delivery. E-health technologies provide efficient and effective ways to share medical information, but they also raise issues over which medical professionals and consumers have no control. Information security and patient privacy are key impediments that hinder sharing data as sensitive as health information. Additionally, health information interoperability hinders the adoption of available e-health technologies. Here, the authors propose an information accountability solution combining the HL7 interoperability standard and social networks for manipulating personal health records.

Principles of Information Accountability: An eHealth Perspective

Information accountability is seen as a mode of usage control on the Web. Due to its many dimensions, information accountability has been expressed in various ways by computer scientists to address security and privacy in recent times. Information accountability is focused on how users participate in a system and the underlying policies that govern the participation. Healthcare is a domain in which the principles of information accountability can be utilised well. Modern health information systems are Internet based and the discipline is called eHealth. In this paper, the authors identify and discuss the goals of accountability systems and present the principles of information accountability. They characterise those principles in eHealth and discuss them contextually. They identify the current impediments to eHealth in terms of information privacy issues of eHealth consumers together with information usage requirements of healthcare providers and show how information accountability can be used in a healthcare context to address these needs. The challenges of implementing information accountability in eHealth are also discussed in terms of our efforts thus far.

The Role of Perceived Usefulness and Attitude on Electronic Health Record Acceptance

Information and communications technologies are a significant component of the healthcare domain and electronic health records play a major role within it. As a result, it is important that they are accepted en masse by healthcare professionals. How healthcare professionals perceive the usefulness of electronic health records and their attitudes towards them have been shown to have significant effects on their overall acceptance. This paper investigates the role of perceived usefulness and attitude on the intention to use electronic health records by future healthcare professionals using polynomial regression with response surface analysis. Results show that the relationship is more complex than predicted in prior research. The paper concludes that the predicting properties of the above determinants must be further investigated to clearly understand their role in predicting the intention to use electronic health records and in designing systems that are better adopted by healthcare professionals of the future.