The Cyber Security Issues in the NHS

From a study by Huckvale, et al. (2015), I found out that in the UK NHS, more than 89% of the mobile phone Apps are used to transmit patient information to online services. In the same study, I learned that 66% of the Apps are used by the National Health Services to send patients identification information over the internet. However, with the NHS continuing to use the smartphones Apps to transmit patient’s identification data to the healthcare organisations database, 20% of the information does not have privacy policies. This is an issue to the security of the patient's personal information (Huckvale, et al., 2015). From the review of the research concerning “Unaddressed Privacy Risks in Accredited Health and Wellness Apps,” I confirmed that a smaller number of Medicare Apps used by the NHS provide links to external privacy policies, but the policies do not work due to the issue of Apps crashing repeatedly. As a result, I think that the use of Medicare Apps could cause a major problem to the NHS cyber security matters, as the medical healthcare mobile Apps do not promote or generate patient’s information privacy. Correspondingly, through a systematic review of a study by He et al., (2014), I established that in a group of 160 mHealth Apps, more than 7 attacks happen and this is a major concern for the safety and confidentiality of information about patients and treatment. Here, He et al., (2014) comment that at about 46.88% Apps are used by the healthcare organisations to manage and synchronize patient’s information. Similarly, I identified that 60% as the majority of the Apps used by the NHS doctors to carry out treatments services are in the life management category. Despite the increment in the use of mobile Apps in the NHS systems, other people see sensitive information that concerns the patients, especially in the devices such as mobile phone Apps logs, server logs, and browser history, which poses major security issues on the patient's confidential information.