News

Security risks for medical kiosks?

June 12, 2014

Medical kiosks that connect patients with remote doctors pose unforeseen security and privacy risks, warns an article in Healthcare IT News.

The kiosks, such as the ones to be installed by HealthSpot for Cleveland Clinic, use video streams to connect patients and doctors via vendor clouds.

These video streams pose security issues, Kathy Jobes, Sentara Healthcare’s chief information security officer, told Healthcare IT News. Not only are there encryption issues with the video streams, but also patient authentication issues, she said. With different medical personnel looking at the video remotely, it would be possible for someone to impersonate another person in order to obtain personal information or steal prescriptions, Jobes said.

Data is also at risk of theft in the vendor cloud, in backup locations and when used by doctors on the move, Jobes said. She asked how would data be shared with other medical service providers and ultimately destroyed.

The use of personal data by the vendor company is an issue, Healthcare IT News points out. Abuse of the data could pose a reputational risk for health centers such as Cleveland Clinic, the publication warned.