Читать книгу Do No Harm - Matthew Webster - Страница 37

The use of mobile applications in medicine is becoming more common with each passing year. They cover everything from information and time management, access to records, communication and consulting, patient management and monitoring, to aids for clinical decision-making. They are helping to lead the charge for better decision-making and improved patient outcomes. With digitalization of records, healthcare professionals can access the information from anywhere. For some this is a marvelous miracle. For devices that are heavily controlled by corporations, the risks are relatively low. The challenge comes in with consumer technology. We do not necessarily have the most up-to-date versions of the software. While some people buy the latest technology, keep up to date with patching, and have antivirus installed on their devices, others do not. There is also a tremendous number of risks from downloading applications with malicious software in them. Review 42 identified that one in 36 phones had a high-risk application in them.³⁵ If you tie that back to phones that are not patched or protected, this is a very large volume of phones at high risk.

Let's take a look at this from another perspective. Science News had an article where a research team from the University of Sydney, the University of Toronto, and the University of California studied how top-rated medicine tracking mobile apps shared data. They looked at the top 24 apps on the Android platform within the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. They were looking for potential data leaks beyond the apps themselves. They found that 19 out of 24 of the apps shared data outside of the apps. A total of 55 unique entities were receiving the data. Those unique entities were owned by 46 parent companies. The entities they analyzed could share the information with 216 fourth parties, including multinational technology companies.³⁶ What they did not state in the article was whether those 216 parties had limitations about the data that is shared. Nonetheless, this is fairly concerning as it does shed light on how many companies do business this way from one app.