Privacy Engineering: A Health Privacy Risk Model

Health institutions have realized the importance of privacy engineering that focuses on development of guidelines, practices and models for the protection of patients’ privacy. However, due to the intricate healthcare systems with transitive health workflows, the processing of patient information in one setting may be more problematic than that in another. As a solution to this problem, we deconstruct the complex transitive healthcare system into individual activity sub-systems, and develop an inter-organizational privacy risk model that facilitates assessing privacy risk in individual activity sub-systems within the transitive health information workflows. This research contributes to privacy engineering by demonstrating how the privacy risk model can be utilized to mitigate the risks to patient information.