Privacy, Patients and Healthcare Workers

This paper examines the social impact of healthcare systems upon two key stakeholders: patients and healthcare workers. The paper focuses upon ‘privacy’, a growing concern of organisations involved in the delivery of healthcare services. Surprisingly, privacy is typically undervalued in information systems development, including healthcare systems. This paper applies a developmental privacy framework to determine a variety of privacy issues pertinent to the use of ICT for healthcare applications in the context of the two stakeholders above. The framework identifies privacy issues relevant to the stakeholders and a number of relevant themes are discussed. The paper also notes the absence of human-centred investigations of privacy in healthcare informatics. Finally, the paper demonstrates a recently developed privacy framework in assessing the social impact of technology in healthcare.