Renato Iannella

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.

HyperSAM: a management tool for large user interface guideline sets

Smith & Mosier (1986) produced the most comprehensive set of guidelines for computer systems interfaces. These included 944 individual guidelines detailing recommendations on the design of the user interface. The report by Smith and Mosier (SAM1) recommended guidelines for user interface design in six functional areas: Data Entry (199 guidelines), Data Display (298), Sequence Control (184), User Guidance (110), Data Transmission (83), and Data Protection (70).

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.

Privacy by Design : Does it matter for social networks?

Privacy is an important component of freedom and plays a key role in protecting fundamental human rights. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that without appropriate levels of privacy, a person’s rights are diminished. Users want to protect their privacy - particularly in “privacy invasive” areas such as social networks. However, Social Network users seldom know how to protect their own privacy through online mechanisms. What is required is an emerging concept that provides users legitimate control over their own personal information, whilst preserving and maintaining the advantages of engaging with online services such as Social Networks. This paper reviews “Privacy by Design (PbD)” and shows how it applies to diverse privacy areas. Such an approach will move towards mitigating many of the privacy issues in online information systems and can be a potential pathway for protecting users’ personal information. The research has also posed many questions in need of further investigation for different open source distributed Social Networks. Findings from this research will lead to a novel distributed architecture that provides more transparent and accountable privacy for the users of online information systems.

A greater understanding of social networks privacy requirements: The user perspective

Abstract Social Networks (SN) require an accurate understanding of the complex privacy requirements of users to demonstrate respect for user privacy requirements whilst also encouraging sharing. This research extends current understanding of SN user privacy requirements using the PREview approach, drawing on a thematic analysis of related scholarly articles and validating and extending themes by survey. The findings instantiate five primary privacy requirements including: Information Control, Information Collection and Storage, Information Access, Secondary Use, and Social Network Practice, and a further twenty five secondary requirements. This research has the potential to assist with the development of enhanced SN privacy controls.

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.

Key Issues in Digital Library Interoperability

To cope with the explosion of electronically available information, Digital Libraries must interact if they are to meet the information requirements of their clients. This paper gives an overview of some of the key issues that digital projects will need to address so as to reach an acceptable level of interoperability.