| The proposed Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is one of several efforts, embarked upon in the United State, to implement the future full-digitization system planned for the country's healthcare sector. This refers to a future state, when all internal and external systems of healthcare organizations will become computerized. In this study, potential security and privacy threats of the initiative were examined. Of particular interest was the issue of medical identity theft (MIT), a new criminal phenomenon that combines aspects of healthcare fraud and classical identity theft. A homogeneous group of 10 healthcare information security and privacy experts collaborated to investigate the research problem. The future security concerns of confidentiality and integrity, in particular, were investigated for the internal and external aspects of organizations. Data collection and analysis was done in two stages; the first included one-on-one interviews with the participants, the next was a facilitated group communication process that employed the Delphi technique to seek the group's consensual agreement on the individual issues earlier generated. Data were analyzed using grounded theory's technique of constant comparison while theoretical saturation guided ongoing data collection. In the end, digitization was identified as a potential catalyst for MIT. The panel agreed on a variety of potential contexts, gaps, strategies, and consequences of MIT that are situated at the confluence of healthcare digitization and MIT. The experts, however, also, jointly proffer several plausible mitigating strategies organizations could leverage to address this future problem. Meanwhile, the experts assessed digitization an enabling platform, which if leveraged appropriately, will produce security and privacy capabilities not previously attainable. |
