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China (the mainland) is a developing country with a large population over a vast area, where healthcare services are not balanced. The Chinese government faces a mammoth task to provide health and medical services to the population. About eight years ago, the government defined its direction to electronic health (e-health). Since then, hundreds of e-health record systems have been developed, but the systems are still in their infancy. For the establishment of matured e-health record systems, this paper examines current status of China’s development of e-health record systems, identifies the challenges encountered by the development and analyses the outlook of future systems in China.

Australia is among a few countries that have developed national electronic health (e-health) record systems. From July 1, 2012, Australians can register with the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) system. Development of e-health systems is supported by stakeholders in Australia, however, the PCEHR system has been widely criticized. For the establishment of a matured e-health record system, this paper examines current status of Australia’s development of e-health record systems, identifies the challenges encountered by the development, and analyses the outlook of the PCEHR system.

In 2005, Chinese government defined its direction to electronic health records and electronic medical records. Up to 2012, hundreds of electronic health record systems and electronic medical systems have been developed, but the systems are still in their infancy, and China is facing a variety of challenges in implementation of the systems. To overcome the challenges and achieve system benefits, recommendations are provided for implementing a national electronic health system.

Consideration of e-health record systems in Australia started in 2000. Based on the effort to develop stand-alone and state-wide systems, the national Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record system was released on July 1, 2012. However this system has been widely criticised, although stakeholders are in favour of a national system. To overcome the challenges to the system and achieve its benefits, recommendations are provided for improving system effectiveness and usability, and adopting applicable government policies.

To ensure that patient confidentiality is securely maintained, health ICT applications that contain sensitive personal information demand comprehensive privacy policies. Determining the adequacy of these policies to meet legal conformity together with clinical users and patient expectation is demanding in practice. Organisations and agencies looking to analyse their Privacy and Security policies can benefit from guidance provided by outside entities such as the Privacy Office of their State or Government together with law firms and ICT specialists. The advice given is not uniform and often open to different interpretations. Of greater concern is the possibility of overlooking any important aspects that later result in a data breach. Based on three case studies, this paper considers whether a more formal approach to privacy analysis could be taken that would help identify the full coverage of a Privacy Impact Analysis and determine the deficiencies with an organisation's current policies and approach. A diagrammatic model showing the relationships between Confidentiality, Privacy, Trust, Security and Safety is introduced. First the validity of this model is determined by mapping it against the real-world case studies taken from three healthcare services that depend on ICT. Then, by using software engineering methods, a formal mapping of the relationships is undertaken to identify a full set of policies needed to satisfy the model. How effective this approach may prove as a generic method for deriving a comprehensive set of policies in health ICT applications is finally discussed.

This chapter gives an educational overview of: * Confidentiality issues and the challenges faced; * The fundamental differences between privacy and security; * The different access control mechanisms; * The challenges of Internet security; * How 'safety and quality' relate to all the above.

A new framework of privacy-preserving identity management for distributed e-health systems is proposed. Utilizing a consumer-centric approach, the healthcare consumer maintains a pool of pseudonymous identifiers for use in different healthcare services. Without revealing the identity of consumers, health record data from different medical databases distributed in various clinic/hospitals can be collected and linked together on demand. While pseudo-anonymity preserves user privacy, the architectural design allows the anonymity to be revoked by a trusted authority under well-defined policies with legal-compliance. This framework inherits the advantages in centralized management for distributed medical databases Security of the interactions among different entities in the architecture is guaranteed by certification and cryptographic technologies.

Purpose Health managers, administrators and health practitioners now face new challenges due to the increasing dependency being placed on electronic health information systems. This paper focuses on Electronic Health Records for determining the critical attributes for e-health system development. The proposed QUiPS model aims to provide a framework for building trustworthy solutions by identifying the pertinent issues needed to determine the risk exposure with a given system. Approach To produce dependable, low risk and viable IT solutions, each critical attribute needs to be specifically addressed and prioritized. It is shown how these attributes possess a number of interdependencies making the analysis and prioritization tasks complex and hence, in practice, often incomplete. Two Australian case studies are presented that access enterprise level applications of live health records where these risk based techniques have been applied. Results The value and the shortcomings of taking a risk based approach to developing and deploying electronic health information systems that are safe and secure, is evaluated. The case studies presented indicate that traditional methods used to derive the requirements are often inadequate and the risks that are faced in ensuring a safe and secure system are highly application dependent and dynamic. Conclusions Convergence towards a viable universal solution for our electronic health records is not imminent and trust in e-health is fragile. Policies that data custodians follow need to be flexible and updated on a regular basis. Technological solutions are at best a stop gap to avoid the common hazards associated with access control and secure messaging. A wider range of analysis techniques to determine the key issues for a dependable health information system can derive longer term sustainable solutions.

Effective and appropriate implementation of health information systems assists with an organization’s knowledge management. To enhance a user’s trustworthiness and full adoption, a health information system needs to be dependable. This chapter reviews the different development methodologies available for engineering dependable solutions and their application by citing two case studies as an example. Health information systems cover a diverse set of applications. The focus in this chapter is on the development of electronic health record systems, the importance of dependability, and the relationship between dependability and data quality of the health record systems.

The development of the information systems software typically follows standard Software Engineering (SE) practices. SE is a discipline founded on improving development methods to eliminate or mitigate the many risks associated with software projects1 and traditional SE methodologies have generally been classified as following a particular process model e.g. a Waterfall, Spiral or the V process model.2 This ability to apply a particular process model to a method has enabled researchers to theorize about methods in a generic sense and allowed the results of research centered on a particular method to be extrapolated to other methods fitting the same model.

External Broken links have a negative impact on any web page user. However, little or no information is provided in advance to advise the user of the quality of the available links before they hit them. Our contributions in this paper are: (1) To present our arguments to suggest that the external link quality is not binary (broken or available) but instead it is a continuous value from low reliability to high reliability (2) To emphasise the need for the web designers to provide some information in advance to the user suggesting the quality of the link. This approach is very similar to having the image size next to a potential loading image giving the user a broad idea about the resources needed to download that image. (3) To present a new tool called WLGauge that can measure some quality attributes of the external links in a web page. WLGauge is an open framelet that can be easily plugged on to any web site development toolbox. WLGauge has been designed with an intention to help the web designer and web maintenance teams to understand as well as improve the quality of their web pages.

The ultimate aim of software engineering methods and tools is to reduce risks associated with the development of software products. Accepted risk management procedures recognize that software development is inherently risky, however fail to take into account the changing nature of both software products and the organizations undertaking their development. SE research has traditionally focused on the needs of very large corporations undertaking equally mammoth and complex development projects, thus most tools and methods are predicated on this model. Yet most software development is undertaken by small to medium enterprises. Consequently, these development efforts are either undertaken with little or no adherence to any SE standard process or by attempting to tailor processes intended for larger organizations. Neither of these alternatives is ideal, with both introducing new elements of risk. The rise of the Internet as a platform for commercial applications has partly driven this move away from monolithic software development and has also contributed to the proliferation of software products built using COTS components. Clearly there is a risk involved in the use of components not developed specifically for a particular application while Internet applications introduce an. entirely new set of possible risks. These newer risk factors directly affect the quality of the software product and the paper discusses these factors in detail, showing how they contribute to making software development today an even riskier proposition than previously.

E-health systems must be capable of adhering to clearly defined security policies based upon legal requirements, regulations and ethical standards while catering for dynamic healthcare and professional needs. Further, such security policies, incorporating enterprise level principles of privacy, integrity and availability, coupled with appropriate audit and control processes, must be able to be clearly defined by enterprise management with the understanding that such policy will be reliably and continuously enforced. The ability, then, to map such e-health policies into mandatory access control structures for next generation secure computer systems is an essential requirement for the future. This paper provides some principles for addressing these issues and provides a solution space that tackles the technical challenges involved in their implementation.

This paper investigates the use of object-oriented techniques for the specification and design of distributed multimedia applications (DMAs). DMAs are a class of software applications with a range of strong-often conflicting-requirements of dynamicity, interactivity, real-time synchronized processing of several media types, network distribution, high-performance, fault-tolerance, load balancing and security. The development of complex DMAs can benefit from the adoption of object design methods and distributed object implementation technologies. The paper describes the use of two modeling approaches, based on the standard UML modeling language, and on the TRIO formal specification language, respectively. The problem of defining steps to move from the UML or TRIO specification to a CORBA IDL implementation is addressed. An experimental distributed video-on-demand system is used throughout the paper as a case study.