18 February 2021

The increasing digitalisation of health care has many benefis, from faster patient access to healthcare to better tracking of important medical data, whcih can make a big difference in the event of an emergency. However, it also involves new risks and challenges related to privacy and security.

Addressing these challenges through a holistic approach is vital for the protection of patients and healthcare practitioners. Novel methods can guarantee FAIR information processing and allow for trust bulding mechanisms and best practices that involve not only security practicioners, but also public policy makers and the whole healthcare community.

The scientific journal Methods of Information in Medicine is launching a special issue on Security and Privacy in Distributed Healthcare Environments with three expert guest editors: Christos Xenakis (Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece and partner of the CUREX Project), Stephen Flowerday (Department of Information Systems, Rhodes University, South Africa), and Lynne Coventry (Northumbria Cybersecurity Research Group, Northumbria University, UK, Partner of PANACEA Research).

This Focus Theme presents new paradigms and prominent applications for secure, trustworthy and privacy preserving data access, sharing and storage.

Innovative papers, that are not under consideration by other journals or conferences, will be accepted for submission until 20 April, with a focus in the following areas and practical applications in healthcare and medical research:

  •     Data/knowledge representation in information security
  •     Access control methods
  •     Blockchain technology
  •     Privacy preserving methods
  •     Cryptographic techniques in healthcare
  •     Reliability, security, and privacy issues
  •     Secure and trustworthy information sharing
  •     Security in Internet of (Medical) Things
  •     Secure data management in cloud-based architectures
  •     Threat detection and analysis
  •     Guidelines for protection of personal health data
  •     Security risk assessments in healthcare
  •     Ethical and patient safety implications

 

For any detail about the submission requirements, please visit this page.