Improving accessibility of the Australian My Health Records while preserving privacy and security of the system
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Health Information Science and Systems
RESEARCH
Improving accessibility of the Australian My Health Records while preserving privacy and security of the system Pasupathy Vimalachandran1, Hong Liu2*, Yongzheng Lin2, Ke Ji3, Hua Wang1 and Yanchun Zhang1
Abstract Australian My Health Record (MyHR) is a significant development in empowering patients, allowing them to access their summarised health information themselves and to share the information with all health care providers involved in their care. Consequently, the MyHR system must enable efficient availability of meaningful, accurate, and complete data to assist an improved clinical administration of a patient. However, while enabling this, protecting data privacy and ensuring security in the MyHR system has become a major concern because of its consequences in promoting high standards of patient care. In this paper, we review and address the impact of data security and privacy on the use of the MyHR system and its associated issues. We determine and analyse where privacy becomes an issue of using the MyHR system. Finally, we also present an appropriate method to protect the security and privacy of the MyHR system in Australia. Keywords: Data security, Health care, EHR, EMR, PCEHR, MyHR Introduction The Australian government announced that the MyHR system would transition to opt-out participation. This means that Australians have been given 195 days period to opt-out of having a MyHR created for them if they do not want one. As a result of this, the end of the optout period, the participation rate was 90.1%, with the national opt-out rate of 9.9%. In other words, 9 out of 10 Australians currently have a My Health Record. This is a significant milestone in the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR)/MyHR implementation in Australia. While the majority of Australians have MyHR, 9.9% which is around 2.5 million people have opted out of MyHR. This raises a number of serious questions around the system. The major concern of the system is privacy and security concerns. Privacy advocates say that, even with the safeguards, the system takes too much information, stores it too simply, and shares it too *Correspondence: [email protected] 2 School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250014, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.
freely [1]. Better sharing of health data among health care professionals is a good aspect of the system as long as it is done in a controlled manner. Therefore, the question currently remains is, do the MyHR shares the required health information in a controlled manner? Furthermore, access control of the MyHR has an issue. Every health care provider group should have different access permission or view to protecting the privacy of the system. If a patient has a mental health issue, the patient does not want that shared with a dentist or someone who looks at your feet. If someone has a medical condition that might resul
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