SOUTH AFRICA – An exclusive report from the BroadReach Group has highlighted the value of sharing vital health data across platforms and geographies to manage the global spread of infectious diseases as travel increases following the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Broadband Group, there are three important international standards setting international best practice for the protection of general personal information and personal health information.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the USA and the private sector-led HITRUST Alliance,” revealed the advisory firm.

To mark October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the BroadReach Group organized a webinar to discuss conflicting priorities particularly how smart policies, thoughtful frameworks and underlying technologies can enable both data privacy and data sharing.

The webinar covered the importance of health data ownership, data protection vs data sharing, and data residency, including personal ownership of health data, and public and private organizations’ challenges and responsibilities in keeping it safe and secure,” the Group announced in a release.

Ruan Viljoen, Chief Technology Officer at the BroadReach Group led the discussion with Dr. Farley R. Cleghorn, Global Head of Health Practice at the Palladium Group and Dr. Justin Maeda, Principal Regional Collaborating Centers (RCC) Coordinator at the Africa Center for Disease Control (CDC).

Health data is the most sensitive personal data we can store and warrants an even stricter duty of care. We should not put individuals in a position where they should have to trade their privacy in order to receive good healthcare,” said Viljoen.

In addition, the leaders agreed that governments are the custodians of the human rights of their people and therefore have the primary responsibility to protect their citizens’ data while acknowledging that the issue is complex and a multi-sectoral approach is needed.

Individuals need to take control of their health data. You should assume you have a right to that information, that you can control your information, and that you can use it for your own benefit,” highlighted Dr. Cleghorn.

They emphasized that governments could protect their citizens by disaggregating patients’ health data to make it impersonal and unidentifiable to third parties at a time when cyber-security has become more important in healthcare as attacks increase

Attackers are quite patient and look around – recent studies show that it takes organisations an average of 271 days before they detect that they have been breached, and another 70-odd days to rectify the situation,” highlighted the Chief Technology Officer.

He explained that cyber-attacks lead to reputational and financial damage and interferes with service delivery, which is detrimental in the healthcare setting, adding that it could take an organization a while before it can return to normality. 

We have more data points on every aspect of the individual than ever before, and this will just exponentiate over the next few years. This can be very good for tailored individual healthcare, but the data must be used ethically and safely,” concluded Viljoen.

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