My Health Record and Emerging Cybersecurity Challenges in the Australian Digital Environment

Introduction

In the 21st century, developed countries such as Australia, has adopted digital transformation of healthcare records or e-health revolution for advancing cybersecurity, by implementing My Health Records to empower patients, and improve healthcare practice for clinicians and medical professionals, and provide positive experience to consumers at large. It has been a challenge for the healthcare practitioners, hospital staff as well as patients to accept, embrace, advance, and adopt digital e-health technologies and manage their healthcare records amidst concerns of slow adoption by the patient due to data privacy, security, security of technical devices, user authentication, and Cybersecurity issues (Chandrakar, 2021; Coventry & Branley, 2018; Office of Australian Information Commissioner, 2021a; OAIC, 2021b; Pandey & Litoriya, 2020; Tanwar, Tyagi, & Kumar 2019). The main aim of advancing and embracing innovative digital e-health technologies such as health informatics and ‘My health Records’ is to transform and empower the patients to control their health records, choose the right healthcare provider and suitable treatment, without compromising the safety, privacy and security of private health data. Further, adoption of e-health records, helps in digitizing, maintaining and storing e-health records, and introduces ease of communication between the various healthcare departments through electronic data interchange for sharing information between the patient and the healthcare providers (Baldwin et al., 2017; Bhuyan et al., 2020; Kim & Johnston, 2002; Medhekar & Nguyen, 2020; Queensland Health, 2017; Sittig, 2002).

Given that the e-health revolution is driven by innovators of healthcare technologies, entrepreneurs, medical professionals, healthcare providers and government policy makers to bring about a transformative change in healthcare ecosystems. It is essential that e-health innovation such as My health Record platform is cyber-safe and user-friendly so that consumers as patients feel comfortable, safe, and secure regarding protection of their personal health-care records and diagnostic reports by the hospitals cloud system (Tanwar et al., 2019). Assurance of cybersecurity related to My Health Record’ will help to change the patient experience and empower them to embrace e-health digital technologies and empower the patients to manage their own health records with positive healthcare experience and digitally transform health care delivery (Bhuyan et al., 2016; Coventry & Branley, 2018; Medhekar & Nguyen, 2020; Medhekar, 2021). On the 26^th of November 2018, the Australian parliament passed the My Health Records amendment bill to protect the privacy of the people using the digital e-health system to meet the multi-layered privacy and cybersecurity standards and to protect the electronic health records system from malicious attacks from online hackers and cyber-criminals (Australian Digital Health Agency {ADHA}, 2019; Aunger, 2020). Since COVID-19 pandemic on one hand governments, business and consumers are increasingly depending on online delivery of business, goods and services; on the other hand cyber criminals are busy attacking the internet cloud information systems from all over the world, stealing money, identities, and sensitive finance, government, business, defense data, research facilities and healthcare data for ransom or stealing patient privacy (Bhuyan et al., 2020; Department of Home Affairs, 2020; Sharma & Purohit, 2018; William, Chaturvedi, & Chakravarthy, 2020).