BYOD, Personal Area Networks (PANs) and IOT: Threats to Patients Privacy

TL;DR

This paper examines how BYOD, PANs, and IoT technologies introduce new privacy threats in healthcare, emphasizing the need for increased awareness and security measures among medical professionals.

Contribution

It identifies specific privacy challenges posed by emerging healthcare technologies and provides a survey assessing healthcare professionals' understanding of these threats.

Findings

Healthcare professionals have limited awareness of IoT-related privacy risks.

Emerging technologies increase the complexity of securing patient data.

Survey results highlight the need for improved training on data privacy.

Abstract

The passage of FISMA and HIPPA Acts have mandated various security controls that ensure the privacy of patients data. Hospitals and health-care organizations are required by law to ensure that patients data is stored and disseminated in a secure fashion. The advent of Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD), mobile devices, instant messaging (such as WhatsApp) and cloud technology however, have brought forth new challenges. The advent of Internet of Things (IOT) have complicated the matters further as organizations are not fully cognizant to the all facets of threats to data privacy. Physicians and health care practitioners need to be made aware of various new avenues of data storage and transmission that need to be secured and controlled. In this paper we look at various threats and challenges that IOT, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Personal Area Networks (PANs) technologies pose to the patients privacy data. We conclude the paper by providing the results of a survey that gauge the depth of understanding of healthcare professionals regarding the emerging threats to patients privacy