background: concept of e-readiness is used in many areas such as e-business, e-commerce, e-government, and e-banking. in terms of healthcare, e-readiness is a rather new concept, and is propounded under the title of e-healthcare. e-health readiness refers to the readiness of communities and healthcare institutions for the expected changes brought by programs related to information and communica...

BACKGROUND Healthcare work is, to a considerable extent, cognitive. Subsequently, the analysis and the design of supporting technology must be sensitive to the cognitive and adaptive demands of the work and to the cognitive strategies employed by healthcare practitioners. Despite the vital role that cognition plays in healthcare work, current technocentric design approaches for healthcare techn...

An important insight in business management during recent years is the awareness that organisations need to focus on the processes that create value for their customers. This is in order to see to that value is created as efficiently as possible and that unnecessary or redundant activity is avoided. As a consequence, the organisations’ IT support need to interact with business processes in a be...

Current challenges in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) include supplying patients with personalized medical information, creating means for efficient information flow between different healthcare providers in order to lower risks of medical errors and increase the quality of care. To address these challenges, the information about patient-related processes, such as currently executed medica...

Access control is a key feature of healthcare information systems. Access control is about enforcing rules to ensure that only authorized users get access to resources in a system. In healthcare systems this means protecting patient privacy. However, the top priority is always to provide the best possible care for a patient. This depends on the clinicians having access to the information they n...

The introduction of sophisticated information, communications and technology into health care is not a simple task, as demonstrated by the difficulties encountered by the Department of Health’s multi-billion programme for the NHS. This programme has successfully implemented much of the infrastructure needed to support the activities of the NHS, but has made less progress with electronic patient...

The volume and severity of information security breaches encountered continues to increase as organizations, including healthcare organizations, struggle to identify more effective security policies and procedures. Publicly available guidelines such as GASSP or ISO17799 that are designed to facilitate development of effective security policies and procedures have been criticized for, among othe...

................................................................ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................... vii ACRONYMS................................................................................................ viii CHAPTERS

i

a well-written and implemented policy contains sufficient information on what must be done to protect the organization's data. According to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [1] and ISO 1779 [2], which is based upon BS7799, authentication mechanisms are defined as part of the security policy that a healthcare information system should follow. The distributed nature of the ...