A Path to Safer, Smarter Care
Technology’s Role in Solving Healthcare Challenges
In today’s digital age, technology plays a vital role in healthcare, offering innovative solutions to pressing challenges. With rising medical costs and aging populations—over a quarter of people in Europe and North America will be over 65 by 2050—healthcare systems are under significant strain.
Digital services like telemedicine and remote patient monitoring provide a promising way to enhance efficiency, accessibility, and affordability.
These tools, from wearable health sensors to virtual doctor consultations, proved invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling care to continue despite lockdowns.
Trust as the Key to Digital Healthcare Success
However, the widespread success of digital healthcare hinges on trust. Patients and doctors must feel confident that these services are safe, secure, and reliable.
Sokratis Vavilis’ research aimed to enhance trust in digital healthcare services by addressing three critical information security challenges: ensuring data reliability, enabling secure access to sensitive data, and improving security incident management.
Key outcomes
As part of this work, Vavilis achieved the following key outcomes:
- Interactive Data Quality Assessment: an interactive method was developed to evaluate the quality of health data collected by patients, such as measurements taken using home devices. This method not only assesses overall data quality but also identifies potential root causes of quality degradation, helping patients and doctors make better decisions.
- Advancing Access Control Systems: many healthcare organizations struggle to transition to modern access control systems that protect sensitive data. Vavilis proposed techniques to assist this transition, including a method to create advanced access control policies using legacy data sources like activity logs. These approaches make it easier for organizations to adopt more secure systems.
- Improved Security Incident Management: to help healthcare providers manage cybersecurity threats, such as data breaches, Vavilis introduced a methodology to rank security alerts by severity and risk. This approach considers the sensitivity of leaked data and assists security officers in prioritizing their response. Additionally, a novel database attack classification system was developed, compatible with modern anomaly-based detection system.
Building Trust to Empower Healthcare
By addressing these challenges, Vavilis’ research offers practical solutions to strengthen trust in digital healthcare. These advancements empower patients to take an active role in their health while enabling providers to deliver safer, higher-quality care.
As digital healthcare becomes an integral part of modern medicine, building trust is the key to unlocking its full potential.
Title of PhD thesis: Enhancing trust in digital services
Supervisors: prof.dr. M. Petkovic, dr. N. Zannone
link
