The Need for Trustworthiness Models in Healthcare Software
Solutions
Raja Manzar Abbas
1
, Noel Carroll
1,2
, Ita Richardson
1,2
and Sarah Beecham
1
1
Lero- The Irish Software Research Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
2
ARCH- Applied Research for Connected Health Technology Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Keywords: Trustworthiness, Healthcare Software, Trustworthiness Attributes.
Abstract: Trustworthiness in software is of vital importance to technology users, especially in health, where lives may
depend on the correct application of software that is fit for purpose. Despite the risk posed by improper use
of technology in the health domain, there is evidence to suggest that stakeholders often trust the software
without fully appreciating the possible consequences. In this paper, we explore what determines
trustworthiness in healthcare software solutions. While there are often claims of improved quality of care,
increased safety and improved patient outcomes using healthcare technology – the scientific basis for such
claims appear to be uncritically accepted. Ultimately, this can lead to a surge in healthcare software solutions,
some of which may be misaligned with healthcare needs and potentially lead to fatal outcomes. To support
health technology stakeholders, we propose a ‘trustworthiness healthcare software model’ that can be
employed to assess the level of trustworthiness associated with healthcare software solutions.
1 INTRODUCTION
The United Nation’s International Standard Industrial
Classification, (2016) categorizes healthcare as
generally consisting of hospital activities, medical and
dental practice activities. Implementations of
potentially transformative healthcare technologies are
currently underway internationally, often with
significant impact on national expenditure. For
example, Ireland has invested approximately €900
million in its e-health while the UK has invested at
least £12.8 billion in a National Programme for
Information Technology (NPfIT) for the National
Health Service. Similarly, the Obama administration
in the United States has committed to a US$38 billion
Healthcare investment (Catwel et al., 2009).
Such large-scale expenditure has been justified on
the grounds that electronic health records (EHRs),
picture archiving and communication systems
(PACS), electronic prescribing (ePrescribing) and
associated computerised provider (or physician) order
entry systems (CPOE), and computerised decision
support systems (CDSSs) will help address the
problems of variable quality, safety and trust in the
modern health care. However, the scientific basis of
achieved quality and trust – which are repeatedly
made and are seemingly uncritically accepted –
remains to be established (Huckvale et al., 2012;
Institute of Medicine, 2007).
1.1 Problem Statement
The ultimate goal of software is to help end-users to
accomplish their tasks in a convenient and efficient
manner. However, the literature suggests that
software technology advancements in healthcare
often failed to ease the lives of the healthcare
professionals. Instead, healthcare professionals often
report a loss of productivity while using healthcare
software. This leads to a lack of trust in the healthcare
software (Velsen et al., 2016).
1.2 Research Question
In this paper we examine the literature on
trustworthiness in healthcare and look particularly at
the associated attributes. We also explore the need for
a healthcare software model of trustworthiness.
Considering the broad and vast nature of software
technology use in healthcare, we argue that
stakeholders need to have a set of criteria by which
they can assess the level of trustworthiness of a given
technology.
Abbas R., Carroll N., Richardson I. and Beecham S.
The Need for Trustworthiness Models in Healthcare Software Solutions.
DOI: 10.5220/0006249904510456
In Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2017), pages 451-456
ISBN: 978-989-758-213-4
Copyright
c
2017 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
451
There is an apparent lack of insight into what a
trustworthiness healthcare software model should
capture, and how it should be applied. To address
these gaps, we formulate the following research
questions:
RQ1. What are the key attributes that define
trustworthiness of healthcare software?
RQ2. What are the current models or
frameworks that capture trustworthiness of
healthcare technology?
1.3 Methodology
To explore these questions, we undertook a structured
literature review. A structured literature review may
be described as appraisals of past studies conducted
systematically, purposefully and methodologically
(Armitage and Keeble-Allen, 2008; Petticrew, 2001).
In the research discussed in this article, a literature
search was completed in the bibliographic databases
ACM Digital Library, IEEE, Springer LINK
and Google Scholar, using the keyword search
phrases ‘trustworthiness’, ‘healthcare software’,
healthcare trust’, ‘trustworthiness models’,
trustworthiness frameworks’, ‘trust attributes’,
trustworthy attributes’, ‘software trustworthiness
and ‘healthcare software trustworthiness’. 2894
initial reference sources were found. From these, after
screening titles and abstracts , 2224 were deemed not
eligible. Out of remaining 670 research articles, 536
articles were screened out after applying the exclusion
criteria on the titles and abstracts - 238 were not
relevant to software engineering, 107 research articles
had no specific intervention about software
trustworthiness (trustworthy, trust), 187 articles did
not mention software attributes and/or models and 4
research articles were not written in English. After
reviewing the full text of the remaining 134 studies,
83 more studies were excluded due to lack of
relevance to the topic and 51 studies were selected as
primary studies.
2 IMPACT OF HEALTHCARE
TECHNOLOGY
Due to the growth in population and shift in
demographics, there is a significant pressure on the
global healthcare system. Shojania et al. (2016),
attribute a toll to medical error of 251,454 deaths in
US hospitals per year, making, they say, medical error
the third-leading cause of death in the USA. The
Institute of Medicine study estimated the cost of
nonfatal medical errors is between $17 billion and $19
billion each year, and that between 2.9% and 3.7% of
all patients admitted suffer some type of injury
because of medical mismanagement. As a result, there
is a growing focus on healthcare technology to offer
greater service efficiency and it has given rise to a
comprehensive sociotechnical model for managing
healthcare through software solutions.
Technological advances have encouraged the
development of new technologies that drive
connectivity across the healthcare sector—apps,
gadgets, and systems that personalize, track, and
manage care using just-in- time information
exchanged through various patient and community
connections (Leroy et al., 2014).
This paradigm shift heavily emphasizes the
process of software development in healthcare
systems. It has also contributed to a shift in healthcare
practice, highlighting our growing reliance and
trustworthiness of software to support healthcare
decisions. However, trusting the healthcare software
solution without validating can have serious and
potentially fatal consequences (Carroll, 2016).
3 TRUSTWORTHINESS WHO
CARES?
Trustworthiness in healthcare software is the sum of
trust in different factors. The composition these
factors can differ for different healthcare users. For
example, for patients, trustworthiness in software
consists of, mostly, a perceived level of control and
privacy, while for healthcare professionals, a larger
and different set of issues play a role, including
reliability and a transparent data storage policy. The
set of factors that affect trustworthiness in a healthcare
portal are different from the sets that have exist for
general software domain. There is a need to study
trustworthiness in healthcare software as a separate
subject to inform the design of reliable interventions.
3.1 Need for Trustworthiness
Healthcare Software Model
With significant growth in healthcare software
solutions, software is having an increasing impact on
clinical decisions and diagnosis. However, there is
little evidence as to the trustworthiness of software.
For example, a glitch in St. Mary’s Mercy Medical
Centre’s (Cork, Ireland) patient management system
“killed” 8,500 patients on paper (National Computer
Security Center, 1985). When St. Mary’s upgraded its
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452
patient management software, there was a mapping
error in the alteration process that triggered the
program to notify 8,500 patients of their incorrect
death.
While unregulated medical devices rarely find
their way to patients, the same cannot be said about
the largely unregulated market for health applications
and software. As such, in reality, there exists a
considerable gap between the potential benefits that
software’s could provide, and what healthcare
professionals are currently likely delivering in
practice. Recent reviews in the therapeutic areas of
bulimia (Nicholas et al., 2015), asthma (Huckvale et
al., 2012), Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
(Olff, 2015), insulin dosing (Huckvale, 2015) and
suicide prevention (Larsen et al., 2016) have yielded
worrying conclusions regarding the quality, scientific
basis and often blatant disregard for safety (The Daily
Mail, 2014),
These errors go some way to illustrating the need
for trustworthy healthcare software. Although
different researchers have tried to address some
attributes of trustworthiness not all attributes have
been identified. We discuss some of the models and
standards and the attributes they cover in an effort to
understand what areas they are lacking in.
3.2 Impact of Trustworthiness on
Quality
The number of medical errors caused by devices
(which have embedded software) and software
applications naturally leads to the questions:
How can healthcare software be made
trustworthy?
What process/mechanism would achieve this?
How do we inform users and healthcare
providers which healthcare software solution
can be trusted and why?
We first identified the attributes of trustworthy
healthcare software and why there is a need for a
trustworthy healthcare software model.
4 DEFINING
TRUSTWORTHINESS
According to Merriam–Webster Dictionary
(2004), trustworthy means worthy of confidence’.
For software products, researchers and practitioners
have a slightly different understanding of ‘trustworthy
software systems’, since we need to view
trustworthiness over time.
Trustworthiness is defined by Amoroso et al.
(1994) as a “level of confidence or degree of
confidence” and software trustworthiness is defined as
a “degree of confidence that the software satisfies its
requirements”. Since the definition is expressed as a
degree of confidence, Amoroso and Taylor
illustrates trustworthiness is dependent upon
management and technical decisions made by
individuals or groups of individuals evaluating the
software. Software trustworthiness is expressed in
terms of a set of requirements, where the ‘set’ is
variable. For example, trustworthiness may be
dependent on the set of functional requirements, or
may be a critical subset of functional requirements, or
it may be some set of requirements that include non-
functional assurance requirements like safety or
security (Amoroso et al., 1994).
In his ICSE 2006 Keynote speech, Boehm (2006)
pointed out the increasing trend of software criticality
and dependability as one of the key software trends.
Over the past 50 years, different strategies such as
formal methods, security assurance techniques, defect
prediction, failure mode and effects analysis, testing
methods, and software assurance techniques have
been proposed to address different aspects of software
trustworthy challenges. Based on these studies,
numerous quality categories and attributes have been
studied as major factors influencing on software
trustworthiness. Among them are included
functionality, reliability, safety, usability, security,
portability, and maintainability, etc.
In addition, Zhang et al. (2012) reviews the
appropriateness of the software attributes summarized
by Yang et al. (2009), and suggests that the
trustworthiness of software is related to the following
set of properties which they redefined to address the
trustworthiness context as:
Safety
Validity
Reliability
Reusability
Scalability
Maintainability
Performance
Carbone et al. (2013) defined trustworthiness from
information and communication technology (ICT)
systems where security challenges include both
confidentiality (or privacy) and in integrity (or trust)
of the data. In particular, the notion of trustworthiness
seems relevant for tagging databases and electronic
patient records with information about the extent to
which test results, diagnoses and treatments can be
trusted.
The Need for Trustworthiness Models in Healthcare Software Solutions
453
Initial findings from literature suggest a lack of
understanding of trustworthiness in the healthcare
software domain and a need for a trustworthiness
process model that define standards or best practices
about the trustworthiness of healthcare software.
In this position paper, we propose the key
attributes that define trustworthiness of healthcare
software and current models that capture
trustworthiness of healthcare technology.
5 THEORETICAL
FOUNDATIONS
Though there is a growing consensus that
trustworthiness is characterized as one that satisfies a
collection of critical quality attributes, yet, there is a
lack of common understanding of healthcare software
trustworthiness – particularly in a healthcare context.
Based on the literature and the sample of definitions
introduced here, we identify that the key factors of
trustworthiness for healthcare software should be
regulation, confidence of the users and meet its
requirements and objectives in a satisfactorily
manner.
5.1 Theoretical Influences on
Developing a Trustworthiness
Healthcare Software Model
The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
guides organisations with a view to ensuring that the
correct software is being developed throughout each
stage in the development cycle and conforms to
specification. However, it is important to realise that
software process models, such as CMMI, do not cover
healthcare regulations, and that they need to be used
in conjunction with the regulations (Burton et al.,
2006).
There have been some new developments in this
area, for example the development of MDevSPICE
(formally known as MediSPICE) (Clarke et al., 2014;
McCaffery et al., 2010). The MDevSPICE framework
is one of the first attempts to address the safety
concerns faced by healthcare software producers and
presents a software safety assessment process.
Verification and validation activities are very
important in software development and can consume
much of a project’s costs and effort. While
verification and validation are addressed by process
models and standards for both generic and safety
critical software development, there are still
challenges in undertaking its successful
implementation as part of the software development
process. The process of verification and validation
requires a clear understanding of how each activity is
undertaken and related to each other, which is
important in a healthcare environment (Carroll and
Richardson, 2016).
For example, the development of an international
software process improvement (SPI) framework for
the medical device industry acts as a key enabler of
best practice for the healthcare sector. SPI techniques
offer a continuous cycle of performing an assessment
and restarting the cycle (McHugh et al., 2012) with
the aim of reducing defective software. Software may
also be vulnerable to outside attack. Many hospitals
and healthcare facilities use various threat
management software and firewalls to monitor their
mobile device applications to ensure that they are
secure and safe. In most cases, within the USA, this is
a requirement of Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPPA).
HIPAA is a framework which is followed by
number of organisations for maintaining the security
and privacy of the health information. HIPAA came
into force in 1996 to address a number of concerns,
most notably the need for increased protection of the
medical records of the patients against unauthorised
access (Wu et al., 2012). HIPAA provides a national
standard for electronic healthcare transactions. It also
provides regulations regarding healthcare information
security and privacy (Jepsen, T, 2003). HIPAA covers
entities such as healthcare providers, insurers and
providers of health plan. Healthcare organisations are
now required to individually assess their security and
privacy requirements using various auditing tools.
Healthcare technology systems have access to
personal identifiable information.
Our traditional view of privacy protection
methods through various anonymization techniques
does not provide an efficient way to deal with the
privacy of technological healthcare software
solutions. For example, in response to growing
concerns on privacy and data security, in 2014, the
European Commission published a Green Paper on
mHealth (European Commission, 2014). Through
wide stakeholder consultation, the paper discusses the
main barriers and issues related to mHealth
deployment. They highlight a number of key topics
including data protection, security of health data,
informed consent, big data management, patient
safety and transparency of information across the EU
and, ultimately, on the need to regulate mHealth
applications.
One of the main concerns across industry is the
lack of a unified model which can incorporate all of
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the best practices for healthcare software
development. There is a need to formulate a
healthcare software model that can accurately
propagate trustworthiness throughout the process.
5.2 Towards Developing a
Trustworthiness Healthcare
Software Model
By carefully reviewing the appropriateness of the
attributes summarized through a software lens, we
suggest that the trustworthiness of healthcare software
model is related to the following set of properties:
Security: inclusion of security mechanisms in
the model with respect to access control
processes.
Efficiency: effectiveness of the model
construction that is able to give a quick
response or reaction with minimal resources
and/or time taken.
Safety: inclusion of semantics that represent
process requirements related to safety, and the
ability to highlight inconsistencies in the
process model with respect to safety-related
processes.
Functionality: the functions at the level
expressed in functional requirements of the
model, emphasizing at the level of final user
functionality
Reliability: the probability of the process
model delivering results that is consistent with
the model assumptions.
Regulation: decision support reference model
that will ensure that healthcare software
products are safe and effective to protect and
promote public health through various
standards and regulations.
Validity: the ability of the process model to
reflect the assumptions and constraints about
the software process specified by process
stakeholders.
Accuracy: the measurement tolerance, or
transmission of the process model that defines
or removes the limits of the errors.
6 FUTURE RESEARCH
Having established a foundation for the
Trustworthiness Healthcare Software Model by
identifying the key attributes of trustworthiness from
a healthcare software perspective, we will continue to
build on this to establish key processes and metrics
within the model.
As part of our future research, we will examine
and modify existing trustworthiness models. The
subsequent focus will be on extending and modifying
existing techniques based on our identified attributes
for the analysis. Then our next step will be to take the
trustworthiness model that we develop, to test and
refine it on a large scale with healthcare software
sector. This way, we will also be able to say which
attributes are the most important.
7 CONCLUSIONS
The primary goal for adopting healthcare software is
to provide patients the best service possible by
gathering and interpreting accurate information. This
should help them to take correct and timely decisions
which reduces cost, time and effort, thereby resulting
in the timely treatment of the patient. But, there are
apparent concerns regarding whether we can trust
healthcare software solutions.
We have identified that there is a gap, and
therefore, a consequent need to introduce a
Trustworthiness Healthcare Software Model. In this
study, we have focused on an initial definition of
trustworthiness attributes from literature. We
highlight our next steps towards the development of
the Trustworthiness Healthcare Software Model and
its validation across the healthcare software sector.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“This work was supported with the financial support
of the Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094
and co-funded under the European Regional
Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern
Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Irish
Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie)”.
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