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Health information privacy and security

Guest Editors:
Tony Sahama: University of Victoria, Canada
Kassaye Yitbarek Yigzaw: University Hospital of North Norway, Norway 


BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making welcomed articles presenting original research studies about the development, usability, or use of specific methodologies, novel software, or interesting scale applications of known methods for data privacy and security. This included privacy-preserving data processing techniques such as federated machine learning, privacy-preserving record linkage, and data anonymization. The collection also welcomed studies that discuss practical issues when managing the data integrity of health information and ethical issues arising from potential breaches due to its insufficient privacy and security.

Meet the Guest Editors

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Tony Sahama: University of Victoria, Canada

Dr. Tony R. Sahama is currently Adjunct Professor at the School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, BC, Canada. He has also been an Editorial Board Member of BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making for more than a decade Tony is an expert in Healthcare Information Technology, an open minded transdisciplinary researcher, a team player with 30 years of academic and research experiences with multiple stakeholders of diverse project scopes and requirements, who engages in research, teaching, and consultancy activities to facilitate collaborative practice-based inquiry of learning and to improve ‘Quality of Life’ through data-driven real-time quality decision making processes. Tony’s digital space is www.tonysahama.com.

Kassaye Yitbarek Yigzaw: University Hospital of North Norway, Norway

Kassaye Yitbarek Yigzaw, PhD, is a Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research, University Hospital of North Norway. He graduated from the UiT - The Arctic University of Norway with a PhD in Computer Science (2017). He holds an MSc in Telemedicine and E-health from the same university and BSc. in Electrical Engineering from Hawassa University in Ethiopia. He has been actively involved in various e-health research projects with a research focus on the security and privacy aspects of health information.


About the collection

The widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and the ultra-cheap data collection and processing technologies has led to the collection and processing of large amounts of health-related data. These data have a huge importance in the direct care of patients and purposes which are different from their primary use. However, the ready availability of such large volumes of detailed data has also been accompanied by privacy invasions that raise privacy concerns of patients, providers, and regulators, and there is today an urgent need to address them.

This collection in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making welcomes articles presenting original research studies about the development, usability, or use of specific methodologies, novel software, or interesting scale applications of known methods for data privacy and security. This includes privacy-preserving data processing techniques such as federated machine learning, privacy-preserving record linkage, and data anonymization. The collection also welcomes studies that discuss practical issues when managing the data integrity of health information and ethical issues arising from potential breaches due to its insufficient privacy and security.

Image credit: rawpixel

  1. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a pivotal tool in advancing contemporary personalised medicine, with the goal of tailoring treatments to individual patient conditions. This has heightened the demand fo...

    Authors: Benedetta Gottardelli, Roberto Gatta, Leonardo Nucciarelli, Andrada Mihaela Tudor, Erica Tavazzi, Mauro Vallati, Stefania Orini, Nicoletta Di Giorgi and Andrea Damiani
    Citation: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2024 24:170
    Content type: Software Published on:

  2. Consider a setting where multiple parties holding sensitive data aim to collaboratively learn population level statistics, but pooling the sensitive data sets is not possible due to privacy concerns and partie...

    Authors: Lukas Prediger, Joonas Jälkö, Antti Honkela and Samuel Kaski
    Citation: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2024 24:167
    Content type: Research Published on:

  3. Many state-of-the-art results in natural language processing (NLP) rely on large pre-trained language models (PLMs). These models consist of large amounts of parameters that are tuned using vast amounts of tra...

    Authors: Thomas Vakili, Aron Henriksson and Hercules Dalianis
    Citation: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2024 24:162
    Content type: Research Published on:

  4. The increased application of Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare, has fueled concerns regarding the security and privacy of patient data. Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) algorithms can be seen as a potential...

    Authors: Tserendorj Chinbat, Samaneh Madanian, David Airehrour and Farkhondeh Hassandoust
    Citation: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2024 24:153
    Content type: Research Published on:

  5. Securing adequate data privacy is critical for the productive utilization of data. De-identification, involving masking or replacing specific values in a dataset, could damage the dataset’s utility. However, f...

    Authors: Eunyoung Im, Hyeoneui Kim, Hyungbok Lee, Xiaoqian Jiang and Ju Han Kim
    Citation: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2024 24:147
    Content type: Research Published on:

  6. The Australian healthcare sector is a complex mix of government departments, associations, providers, professionals, and consumers. Cybersecurity attacks, which have recently increased, challenge the sector in...

    Authors: Wendy Burke, Andrew Stranieri, Taiwo Oseni and Iqbal Gondal
    Citation: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2024 24:133
    Content type: Research Published on:

  7. A blockchain can be described as a distributed ledger database where, under a consensus mechanism, data are permanently stored in records, called blocks, linked together with cryptography. Each block contains ...

    Authors: Jonathan Fior
    Citation: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2024 24:109
    Content type: Software Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of Research Articles. Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read our submission guidelines. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Health Information privacy and security" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.