Building an Ethical Framework for Cross-Border Applications: The KONFIDO Project

Abstract

Innovative eHealth technologies and solutions are changing the way healthcare is delivered, raising many challenges regarding the ethical concerns that need to be addressed. There is a growing demand for tools that enable the assessments of the ethical impact in order to assure compatibility or highlight areas of incompatibility. This paper aims to address the ethical challenges that will arise during KONFIDO EU-funded project. KONFIDO project aims to develop tools and procedures to create a paradigm for secure inner and cross-border exchange of healthcare data in a legal and ethical way at both national and European level. The paper proposes an ethical framework that consists of a set of ethical principles derived from recent literature and European regulation and a supporting checklist. The ethical framework represents a concrete and practical guidance for healthcare professionals and developers in order to build ethically acceptable KONFIDO solutions.

Random Number Generation from a Secure Photonic Physical Unclonable Hardware Module

“…Other recent work regarding the KONFIDO project can be found in some recent papers. While in [9] the authors consider the ethical issues related to transborder data exchanges, user requirements are still being investigated while logging the transactions via blockchain is proposed in [10]. …”

Resolving Stakeholder Tussles in Healthcare Systems: Ethical Challenges to Data Protection

“…Although their aim was to look at the use of healthcare data in research, the results might inform perceptions of ethical treatment around health data for actual patient engagement. Based on De Lusignan et al's work [12], Faiella et al [14] sought to use the ethical and privacy principles in order to identify a set of design principles for developing technology to support the secure curation of healthcare data in real life healthcare contexts. They identified six basic principles: trust, privacy & security, related alternately to consent and data subject rights on the one hand and to data management methods; ownership & control; equity; and dignity.…”

“…There is clearly a need to revisit factors beyond regulation and consider 'human choice' as it relates to different agents within a complex network. Based on work by Liyanage, Faiella and their colleagues [12][13][14], we present an ethical framework designed to identify potential tussles within cross-border, coordinated healthcare. Extending the initial attempt to balance societal and individual interests in making health data available [13] to explore contention between the rights and concerns of multiple stakeholders, the framework presents ways in which the ethical and regulatory tussles of those stakeholders around the network may be evaluated.…”

European Cybersecurity Research and the SerIoT Project

“…KONFIDO [73] concentrates on the security of communications and data transfers for interconnected European national or regional health services. Since travellers from European countries must often access health services in another European country, the health informatics systems will have to access remote patient data in a secure manner [73] and the related technical and ethical issues are addressed in a series of recent papers [5,8,16].…”