Privacy in Health Information Systems: A Review

Privacy is a pivotal issue in today's society, where a major concern is to prevent the leakage and abuse of sensitive and confidential information about individuals. It is especially critical in Health Information Systems (HIS) since these systems contain a lot of sensitive information about their patients. In this paper we discuss the overall view of privacy concept in online applications and in HIS, since most HISs are mostly online based. The differences between privacy and security are also discussed, as are some related works in this area and suggestions on how users can protect their privacy. We hope that this paper can be a reference for researchers in this area to give them a good understanding of the concept.