Puneetha Choudhary, Christ (Deemed to be) University, Bangalore
ABSTRACT
During the situation of covid-19 pandemic, one of the major concerns for many countries was security and privacy protection. Which means to bring a balance between the public health surveillance and the patients privacy rights as information security of the patients and their privacy protection is of growing importance. Moreover, as the supreme court in the puttaswamy judgment dated 2018, has also recognised the right to privacy under the ambit of right to life under Article 21 of the constitution of India. Digital health overall provides an improved and cost effective medical services with the help of technology such as health related applications and wearables. This reduces the healthcare cost in the longer run, improves patient consultation, and standardizes the medical procedures. This digital therapy allows the patient to connect effectively with the doctors along with access to their health data. The objective here is to analyze the Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act and to find the issues that are faced while the protection of the digital data in the health care sector takes place . As electronic storage of medical records has revealed the individuals to the risk of identification at different stages of data collection and processing. And to make such information available to physicians alone no longer feasible as the physician- patient relationship will get complicated as the main aim is to look for best practices for the fair and lawful processing of personal data. Moreover, privacy in the context of healthcare is extremely vital. The amount of consumer health data collection is increasing exponentially and very little is known about the extent to which this data is being shared with third parties especially when we are dealing with an invisible enemy in the form of COVID-19. This paper mainly focuses on the digital information security in healthcare act and privacy protection. As it is seen that the present legal framework related to the health protection data in India is not in satisfactory terms for protecting the sensitive data of the patients, even though there are certain steps have been taken for the same.
Keywords: Digital health, Privacy, Electronic, Devices, Article 21.
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