RFID Information Privacy Issues in Healthcare: Exploring the Roles of Technologies and Regulations

• Main Authors: PARKS, Rashida, CHU, Chao-Hsien, XU, Heng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: Computer Sciences; Medicine and Health Sciences
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1778; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15536548.2010.10855891
• Institution: Singapore Management University

With the deployment and use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in the healthcare domain, there are increasing privacy concerns regarding the technical designs of RFID systems vis-à-vis the requirements of the healthcare regulations. This paper reviews and analyzes the impact of privacy issues in the RFID adoption in the healthcare domain, and presents a conceptual framework for analyzing the relationship between technology and regulations in light of the Fair Information Practice (FIP) principles to ensure patients’ privacy. Our conceptual framework uses the FIP principles as a guideline to examine the design of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and analyze existing regulations to assess the compliance issues. The conceptual analyses show that current PETs fail to incorporate the FIP principles and thus organizations in the healthcare sector face complex challenges to comply with security and privacy standards and regulations. Using the groundwork laid down in this study, future research along these directions could contribute significantly to address privacy concerns pertaining to RFID for both academia research and industry practice in the context of healthcare.