Monday 12 May 2014

Privacy and Big Data in Medicine

A short article by myself on the subject of privacy in medicine was just published in the web magazine Britain's Nurses. Quite an experience writing for a very different audience than software engineers, but extremely interesting to note the similarities between the domains.

When it comes to privacy, one of the seemingly infinite problems we face is how to develop the techniques, tools and technologies in our respective domains. Here again we have the choice of reinventing the wheel or looking to different domains and use their knowledge and experiences. This latter route is the much preferred but rarely taken.

So for the moment, I'll take the chance to look back on previous articles that draw lessons from other domains:
Domains such as medicine, civil engineering and especially aviation have been through this process and as information rises in value - that is the economic effects of a data breach or loss of consumer confidence - reach levels where companies will figuratively crash, so the need to take in these learnings and treat information handling as any other element in a safety-critical system.

Finally the article I mentioned: Privacy in Digital Health, 12 May 2014, Britain's Nurses