Information Security in Healthcare

At June 23, 2015, experts from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts will discuss with experts from the fields of medicine and informatics as well as health policy makers, among other things, security risks in the transmission and storage of patient data.

Personal data - especially medical data - must be secure. Politicians and the public agree on this. However, increasing cost pressure in the medical sector is forcing service providers such as doctors, hospitals and health insurers to process more and more data at an ever faster pace. Moreover, a lot of patient data has to be sent from one institution to another: a security risk?

"The various techniques have their advantages and disadvantages," says Peter E. Fischer, head of the Information Security Competence Center at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. "Many doctors today still prefer to send patient data by fax rather than e-mail, assuming that a fax, once in transit, is more difficult to intercept than an e-mail," he says. But for that calculation to work out, he says, the recipients' fax machine should not be located in an open-plan office. In addition, it's easy to make a mistake when entering fax numbers, he adds. "A secure Internet platform for the exchange, reliable encryption of the e-mails or strict anonymization of the data may therefore be the better solution."

That is why data protection is a central topic at Switzerland's first "Information Security in Health" conference at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Rotkreuz. Here, solution providers, users and decision-makers will come together to discuss how best to implement efficient and at the same time secure data collection, transmission and storage.

(Press release HSLU)