Digital Privacy in Healthcare: State-of-the-Art and Future Vision

The article draws inspiration from IEEE Digital Privacy, which explores attaining privacy goals for individuals in the digital realm. Privacy is an umbrella term that equates to respect for an individual’s dignity. When it integrates with digital technology, it alludes to individuals’ right and authority to control the flow of their personally identifiable information (PII) on the digital platform. Adopting digital technology in healthcare is not novel, but the COVID-19 outbreak has accelerated its incorporation into healthcare. Digital technology perks a wide range of healthcare professions, including biomedicine, diagnostic imaging, and remote patient monitoring, to mention a few, through facilitating accurate and effective health-related decisions. Thanks to technological advancements, healthcare professionals and other medical personnel are now quickly accessing and retaining patient information, which aids in scouring for optimal and swiftly acted-upon medications. While the technology’s inception is positive, it raised privacy issues for patients’ PII and other sensitive health data that remain intact. The review article addresses the key challenges in digital privacy for healthcare while also reviewing the state-of-the-art work by investigating data encryption techniques, access control mechanisms, and risk assessment techniques with digital privacy as a primary concern. Every country has enacted resilient laws and regulations to protect digital privacy in healthcare, which are briefed in the article. Artificial intelligence (AI) has proven valuable in cybersecurity and healthcare technology growth. As a result, the article delves into the hurdles of employing AI for healthcare digital privacy and cutting-edge work in healthcare digital privacy using AI. Finally, the article concludes with a future vision of data privacy in healthcare.