Title
Ethical issues in public health informatics: implications for system design when sharing geographic information
Abstract
Public health programs today constitute a multi-professional inter-organizational environment, where both health service and other organizations are involved. Developing information systems, including the IT security measures needed to suit this complex context, is a challenge. To ensure that all involved organizations work together towards a common goal, i.e., promotion of health, an intuitive strategy would be to share information freely in these programs. However, in practice it is seldom possible to realize this ideal scenario. One reason may be that ethical issues are often ignored in the system development process. This investigation uses case study methods to explore ethical obstacles originating in the shared use of geographic health information in public health programs and how this affects the design of information systems. Concerns involving confidentiality caused by geographically referenced health information and influences of professional and organizational codes are discussed. The experience presented shows that disregard of ethical issues can result in a prolonged development process for public health information systems. Finally, a theoretical model of design issues based on the case study results is presented.
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1016/S1532-0464(02)00527-0
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
it security,public health,geographic information system,health informatics,confidentiality,development process,public health informatics,requirement engineering,use case,information system,privacy,system design
Public health,Information system,Data mining,Geographic information system,HRHIS,Confidentiality,Computer science,Knowledge management,Public health informatics,Information Dissemination,Health informatics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
35
3
1532-0464
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.46
3
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christina Ölvingson141.18
Jonas Hallberg2546.51
T Timpka318632.73
Kent Lindqvist430.46