Cyber Security and Data Privacy for Healthcare Industry

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, the technologies of E-health systems and cyber security have experienced a sequence of evolutionary inventions as it significantly promotes the quality of human life. Cyber security is a ubiquitous paradigm that provides a set of standards and protocols to protect networks, devices, and data from cyber-attacks and several other network vulnerabilities. Anything (mobiles, smart devices, computers, etc.) that communicate through the internet are subject to the risk of security breaches and requires greater attention. The size of the cyber market is wide, which includes numerous sectors such as manufacturing, finance, healthcare, telecommunications, information technology, government, transport systems, retail, production, energy, and utilities, etc. For these sectors, cybersecurity acts as a backbone of the economy as they are highly concerned about security measures. Healthcare possesses the most predominant role among these sectors as it contains the most confidential patient information. Here, the cyber attacks on Electronic Health Records (EHR) may jeopardize the patients' safety by losing access to patient personal information and medical devices. Similarly, wearable devices that are used to monitor patient movement and gesture, track regular activity, monitor organ functioning, and diagnosis of diseases when exposed to security breaches shall cause great damage both to the patients and the healthcare provider. To overcome these security and privacy issues faced by patients, pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations holistic approaches should be involved with cyber-enabled features.  

It is also well known that healthcare sectors aim to minimize the severity and advancement of diseases with improved digital approaches. Body Area Networks (BAN), Electronic Health Records (EHR), Personal Health Records (PHR), mobile Health (mHealth), patient portals, and patients health applications are some of the considerable evolution of healthcare systems using advanced digital approaches. Thus, the revolutionary approaches for healthcare systems do not only prevent disease occurrence, rather it tracks and monitors every aspect of the patient’s health through projected body sensors and interconnected Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Hence, healthcare applications generate a huge volume of data every second.  Storage and processing of health data are highly crucial as it is concerned with several security risks. Even a breakthrough in a single terabyte of data can lead to highly vulnerable security threats and adversely affect the patient’s lives. To the most important, online health records are not HIPPA constraints and may subject to various levels of privacy and cybersecurity concerns. In response to the increasing threats and breaches, researchers across the world started focusing on effective solutions for cybersecurity across E-health infrastructures. Moreover, Effective firewall, regular software updates, authentication, limited network access, controlled system access, protected apps, and regular risk assessment are some of the security practices that can make the cyber-based security system more effective. However, it is more complex to define accurate cybersecurity solutions and to recognize standard cybersecurity requirements for healthcare systems.

This special issue is intended to foster effective applications of cybersecurity and data privacy solutions for healthcare systems. Researchers and academicians from various backgrounds are requested to submit their novel and unpublished solutions for healthcare systems using cybersecurity and data privacy mechanisms. The topics of the special issue include but not limited to the following:

• Trust-based protocols for healthcare applications
• Achieving data security and privacy across healthcare applications using cybersecurity mechanisms
• Authentication and Access control mechanisms for healthcare applications
• Real-time healthcare monitoring and security alerting systems
• Fog and cloud computing for secure healthcare solutions
• IoT assisted secure solutions for healthcare applications
• Artificial Intelligence algorithms for earlier analysis and prediction of cyber threats in Smart Healthcare
• Multi-agent cybersecurity solutions for healthcare applications
• The role of computational intelligence in cybersecurity solutions for healthcare applications
• Enhancing privacy and data security across healthcare applications using blockchain and distributed ledger concepts
• Security and Privacy for Internet of Medical Things
• Cyber Security threats on the Internet of connected mobile ambulance
• Security solutions for e-healthcare industry
• Case studies for innovative techniques to protect patients’ information using cybersecurity
• Future challenges of emerging cyber-threats to health infrastructure
• Recent advances in cybersecurity for addressing security practices in Healthcare institutions

Dr. Ching-Hsien Hsu
Dr. Amir H. Alavi
Dr. Mianxiong Dong
Dr. Ning Zhang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Cybersecurity
• Data analytics
• Machine learning
• Block chain
• Healthcare
• Data privacy
• Internet of Medical Things
• E-healthcare