Browsing by Author "Els, Floyd Nathaniel"

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    A privacy management framework for mobile personal electronic health records in South Africa
    (University of Fort Hare, 2017) Els, Floyd Nathaniel; Cilliers, Liezel
    South Africa’s health status is in constant dismay, especially while under the strain of the quadruple burden of disease. The adoption of personal electronic health records (PEHRs) can be seen as a means to improve this status by empowering patients to manage their health and lifestyle better. While from the healthcare provider’s perspective, PEHRs has the ability to reduce medical errors; provide better communication channels and enhance the monitoring of patients. Despite these benefits for both healthcare providers and patients, there are three distinct information security threats relating to PEHRs. These threats refer to the individual, data in transit, and at rest. South Africa is still considered to be inexperienced with PEHRs, and consider it a relatively new concept to the healthcare system. The National e-Health Strategy and Protection of Personal Information Bill were discussed and compared to international standards in order to ascertain South Africa’s current standing on mobile healthcare privacy. However, there are no specific privacy and security controls in place to protect patients that access personal electronic health records through mobile devices. Therefore, the aim of this study is the development of a privacy management framework (PMF) to mitigate these privacy concerns. Following an interpretivistic approach to research, qualitative data was analysed from literature, and the privacy framework evaluated through expert reviews. The proposed PMF consists of 3 tiers, beginning with the top tier. The first tier relates to an organisations interpretation and understanding of data privacy laws and regulations, and in ensuring compliance with these laws. The second tier refers to two support pillars to maintain the first tier. These pillars are based on elements of operational privacy, as well as auditing and reviewing. The third tier serves as the basic foundation upon which the PMF was developed. It is mainly focused with creating privacy awareness amongst healthcare providers and patients by creating: training regimes on security and privacy threats, efficient communication standards, and constant ongoing support from top level management.