Keynote: Six Research Challenges for the Security and Privacy of Health Information Technology

Carl A. Gunter University of Illinois, USA

Health Information Technology (HIT) has the potential to improve the health of individuals of all ages, aid medical research, and reduce the costs of delivering healthcare, but its effective use and acceptance by the public and healthcare professionals depend on employing proper protections for the security and privacy of health information. While considerable progress can be made by applying current best practices for managing data, there are a number of areas specific to HIT where more research is needed to provide technology to support better practices. At least six key areas need to be addressed: (1) access controls and audit, (2) encryption and trusted base, (3) automated policy, (4) mobile health (mHealth), (5) identification and authentication, and (6) data segmentation and de-identification. This talk will discuss each of these challenges and some of the efforts being made to address them.

Carl A. Gunter received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1979 and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1985. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Cambridge in England before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and the University of Illinois in 2004 where he is now a professor in the Computer Science Department and a professor in the College of Medicine.  He serves as the director of Illinois Security Lab, the Health Information Technology Center (HITC), and the Strategic Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS). Professor Gunter has made research contributions in the semantics of programming languages, formal analysis of networks and security, and privacy. His recent research focuses on security and privacy issues for the electric power grid and healthcare information technologies.