SPECIAL ISSUE ON "SECURITY AND PRIVACY IN DISTRIBUTED HEALTHCARE ENVIRONMENTS"

  Call for Papers for “Methods of Information in Medicine - Focus Theme”

   Security and Privacy in Distributed Healthcare Environments

  Guest editors: Christos Xenakis¹, Stephen Flowerday², Lynne Coventry³

  ¹Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece
  Coordinator of the CUREX project
  ²Department of Information Systems, Rhodes University, South Africa
  ³Northumbria Cybersecurity Research Group, Northumbria University, UK
  Partner of the PANACEA project

The rapid digitalization of health care delivery, from electronic health records and telehealth to mobile health (mHealth) and network-enabled medical devices provides numerous potential opportunities for creation and analysis of large data sets to further health research, knowledge discovery, clinical care, and personal health management. Despite these opportunities there are several challenges related to privacy and security.

To protect patients and healthcare practitioners, it is critically important that the security and privacy problems facing the next generation of cyber-enabled healthcare are addressed through a holistic approach that involves the development of new security and privacy technologies, the collaboration between security practitioners and public policy makers, and ultimately the sharing and adoption of best practices by the security and healthcare communities.

Novel methods to protect personal health information, to guarantee FAIR information processing, and to allow for trust building mechanisms, security measures and privacy management policies are greatly needed in future healthcare systems.

This Focus Theme presents new paradigms and prominent applications for secure, trustworthy and privacy preserving data access, sharing and storage. We are looking for innovative and novel papers, showing interesting and useful results and interpretations in the following areas, with applications in healthcare and medical research:
 

• Data/knowledge representation in information security
• Access control methods
• Blockchain technology
• Privacy preserving methods
• Cryptographic techniques in healthcare
• Reliability, security, and privacy issues
• Secure and trustworthy information sharing
• Security in Internet of (Medical) Things
• Secure data management in cloud-based architectures
• Threat detection and analysis
• Guidelines for protection of personal health data
• Security risk assessments in healthcare
• Ethical and patient safety implications
   

We welcome original and high-quality papers, which are not under consideration by other journals or conferences. Submitted manuscripts need to follow the submission guidelines of “Methods of Information in Medicine” journal (JCR IF 2019: 1.574), and will be rigorously reviewed by at least three reviewers. Please submit them electronically at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/methods and select “Original Article for a Focus Theme” as manuscript type. Please mention the title of this Focus Theme in the cover letter. Methods offers two separate submission tracks: a) print only, free of charge for articles including <= 22.000 characters, and b) open access with an APC fee of 1,650 € per article. Authors may chose their submission method of preference and the Focus Theme will be bundled online at the journal’s website.
 

Submission deadline: 31.03.2021 20.04.2021
Notification of first decision: 30.04.2021 20.05.2021
 

Current Journal metrics

Accept ratio: 23,2%
Avg. days from submission to first decision: 25,1 days
Avg. days from submission to final decision: 31,5 days
 

Contact: Prof. Christos Xenakis, Prof. Stephen Flowerday
Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Sabine Koch
 

CfP PDF version available here.