Healthcare Informatics and Wellness

Presently studies have shown that cyber security incidences are on the rise. Electronic Healthcare systems (EHCS) is now a focus in most of Kenyan level five healthcare facilities for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness in handling patients’ information which is personal and confidential and must be guarded by all means . The EHCS runs crucial patients information used for improving healthcare service delivery when capturing admissions, history tacking, diagnosis, treatment and disease prevention. EHCS is perceived to suffer serious blows from human/machine conflict, posing security and privacy challenges with devastating impact on patients’ medical information and this put many lives at greater clinical risks. With ever growing critical and timely healthcare needs and demands for treatment procedures, additional related industries come into play in the name of health care services sub-contractors. With this phenomenon there has emerged increased concerns and numerous complains touching on Security and Privacy of patients’ information at the main healthcare facilities and more so at the allied sub-contractors. The speculated concerns are querying the rampant inappropriate disseminations of patients’ critical information and the manner in which this information flow back and forth between main facilities and related industries. This study will assess current Security and Privacy frameworks for protection of electronic health information, evaluate the EHCS at the main health care facilities and at the sub contraction levels, carry out evaluation of safety frameworks and develop appropriate security frameworks that would guarantee security and privacy for patients’ information. This study will adopt a descriptive cross-sectional study that seeks to identify security challenges to patients’ electronic medical information. The study will be done at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital JOOTRH and its allied facilities (health services sub contraction level) in Kisumu Kenya,that serves about eight (8) million patients from more than six (6) counties. This study will adopt a randomly chosen fifty (50) respondents who are the EHCS users. Five (5) top administrator, eight (8) I.T assistants, Four (4) Doctors, Five (5) Nurses, Three (3) Pham Tech, six(6) Lab Tech, five (5) Data Clerks and Four (4) Clinical Officers and ten (10) affected/concerned parties. The study will employ the use of structured questionnaires, interviews and document analysis as the main tools for collecting data, arranged in five distinct levels as follows: demographic characteristics, K.A.P on use of EHCS, Security threats on secure use of EHCS, Security frameworks in place for patients’ Electronic health records while using EHCS and recommended Security frameworks to Health facilities, EHCS developers and Vendors. Data will be coded, cleaned and entered into SPSS Version 20.0 for analysis and interpretation. The report will be shared with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital (JOOTRH) Management, Physicians and allied health care workers, ICT staff, other Kenyan Government Level V hospitals, various African medical boards and regulators, African Medical schools and finally EHCS software developers and vendors.