Security and privacy of electronic health records: Concerns and challenges

Abstract

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) can provide many benefits to physicians, patients and healthcare services if they are adopted by healthcare organizations. But concerns about privacy and security that relate to patient information can cause there to be relatively low EMR adoption by a number of health institutions. Safeguarding a huge quantity of health data that is sensitive at separate locations in different forms is one of the big challenges of EMR. A review is presented in this paper to identify the health organizations’ privacy and security concerns and to examine solutions that could address the various concerns that have been identified. It shows the IT security incidents that have taken place in healthcare settings. The review will enable researchers to understand these security and privacy concerns and solutions that are available.

Keywords

• Electronic health records
• Privacy
• Confidentiality
• Security