Abstract
Mobile Medical information systems MMIS or mHealth applications support personal health and potentially improve the health sector by offering a solution to significant problems faced by the healthcare system. While espousing these Mobile Medical Information Systems, sequestration and security issues arise. Due to advanced computing and different capabilities, data security and confidentiality come major enterprises with continuously expanding mHealth operations. European Union General Data Protection (GDPR) and California Consumer Sequestration Act (CCPA) raise mindfulness; still, they need to address developing a system that meets sequestration and security conditions. This paper deals with research literature to understand current privacy and security issues and possible solutions for patients and providers using mHealth applications. This is the reason for several threats, such as information harvesting, tracking patients, relaying attacks, and denial of service attacks, which affect the confidentiality and integrity of these devices. We discussed the challenges and risks associated with Mobile Medical information systems and emphasized the need to address these concerns for widespread adoption. Mitigation strategies include robust security measures, regulatory compliance, and user awareness. We discussed the impact of privacy and security issues on healthcare, including potential harm to patients and disruptions in system functioning, reviewing laws, conducting a literature review, and assessing mHealth system applications. We emphasize the need for comprehensive security measures and continuous evaluation of security practices in mHealth, which need to be addressed to achieve quality, continuity, and portability of health services. We offer a critical and methodical assessment of the state of the art in mHealth security and privacy and suggest a methodology for creating and executing MMIS that is safe and protects privacy.

Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
All data have been included in the article.
References
Zubaydi F, Saleh A, Aloul F, Sagahyroon A (2015) Security of mobile health (mHealth) systems, in IEEE 15th international conference on bioinformatics and bioengineering (BIBE), 2015: IEEE, pp. 1–5
Organization WH (2011) mHealth: new horizons for health through mobile technologies. mHealth: New Horizons Health through Mob Technol
Pieper B (2004) An overview of the HIPAA Security Rule, Part II: standards and specifications. Optometry (St Louis Mo) 75(11):728–730
Teufel S, Holbein R (1996) Security aspects of mobile medical systems, in Proc. of the IFIP TCII WG 11.2 Small System Security
Mitchell S, Ridley S, Tharenos C, Varshney U, Vetter R, Yaylacicegi U (2013) Investigating Privacy and Security Challenges of mHealth Applications,
Braghin C, Cimato S, Della Libera A (2018) Are mHealth apps secure? A case study, in IEEE 42nd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), 2018, vol. 2: IEEE, pp. 335–340
Raij A, Ghosh A, Kumar S, Srivastava M (2011) Privacy risks emerging from the adoption of innocuous wearable sensors in the mobile environment, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 11–20
Kumar S et al (2013) Mobile health technology evaluation: the mHealth evidence workshop. Am J Prev Med 45(2):228–236
Papageorgiou A, Strigkos M, Politou E, Alepis E, Solanas A, Patsakis C (2018) Security and privacy analysis of mobile health applications: the alarming state of practice. Ieee Access 6:9390–9403
Eurobarometer S (2015) Special Eurobarometer 431: Data protection. Directorate-General for Communication, ed
Goddard M, The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (2017) European regulation that has a global impact. Int J Market Res 59(6):703–705
Štarchoň P, Pikulík T (2019) GDPR principles in data protection encourage pseudonymization through most popular and full-personalized devices-mobile phones. Procedia Comput Sci 151:303–312
Naveed M, Zhou X-y, Demetriou S, Wang X, Gunter CA (2014) Inside Job: Understanding and Mitigating the Threat of External Device Mis-Binding on Android, in NDSS
Wazid M, Zeadally S, Das AK, Odelu V (2016) Analysis of security protocols for mobile healthcare. J Med Syst 40:1–10
Knorr K, Aspinall D (2015) Security testing for Android mHealth apps, in IEEE Eighth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW), 2015: IEEE, pp. 1–8
Knorr K, Aspinall D, Wolters M (2015) On the privacy, security, and safety of blood pressure and diabetes apps, in ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection: 30th IFIP TC 11 International Conference, SEC Hamburg, Germany, May 26–28, 2015, Proceedings 30, 2015: Springer, pp. 571–584
Hakone A (2015) From spam to medical identity theft: Exploring the vulnerabilities of Electronic Medical Records
He D, Naveed M, Gunter CA, Nahrstedt K (2014) Security concerns in Android mHealth apps, in AMIA annual symposium proceedings, vol. 2014: American Medical Informatics Association, p. 645
Insights B (2017) A Cisco Partner Network Study.(nd). Retrieved September 15, ed, 2013
Souppaya M, Scarfone K (2013) Guidelines for managing the security of mobile devices in the enterprise. NIST Spec Publ 800(124):800–124
Belapurkar A, Chakrabarti A, Ponnapalli H, Varadarajan N, Padmanabhuni S, Sundarrajan S (2009) Distributed systems security: issues, processes and solutions. Wiley
Elkhodr M, Shahrestani S, Cheung H (2011) Enhancing the security of mobile health monitoring systems through trust negotiations, in IEEE 36th Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2011: IEEE, pp. 754–757
Pfeifer T, Covaci S (2013) Active protection of patient data by reverse cloud approach, in IEEE 15th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services (Healthcom 2013), 2013: IEEE, pp. 716–718
Choh Y, Song K, Bai Y, Levy K (2013) Design and implementation of a cloud-based cross-platform mobile health system with HTTP 2.0, in 2013 IEEE 33rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, : IEEE, pp. 392–397
Merger O, Nitsche U, Teufel S (1997) Security concerns for mobile information systems in health care, in Database and Expert Systems Applications. 8th International Conference, DEXA’97. Proceedings, : IEEE, pp. 312–317
Zanella A, Bui N, Castellani A, Vangelista L, Zorzi M (2014) Internet of things for smart cities. IEEE Internet Things J 1(1):22–32
Hsu C-L, Lin JC-C (2016) An empirical examination of consumer adoption of internet of things services: Network externalities and concern for information privacy perspectives. Comput Hum Behav 62:516–527
Free C et al (2013) The effectiveness of mobile-health technology-based health behavior change or disease management interventions for health care consumers: a systematic review. PLoS Med 10(1):e1001362
Goel S, Bhatnagar N, Sharma D, Singh A (2013) Bridging the human resource gap in primary health care delivery systems of developing countries with mhealth: narrative literature review. JMIR mHealth uHealth 1(2):e2688
Roney K Largest public hospitals in America. Becker’s Hospital Review, ed
Metzger MJ, Suh JJ, Reid S, Abbadi AE (2021) What can Fitness apps teach us about Group privacy? In. Research Anthology on privatizing and securing data. IGI Global, pp 2135–2157
Kuhn ML (2018) 147 million social security numbers for sale: developing data protection legislation after mass cybersecurity breaches. Iowa L Rev 104:417
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Yawen Xing wrote the main manuscript text, and Huizhe Lu and Lifei Zhao prepared Fig. 1; Table 1, and 2. Dr. Shihua Cao revised the manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Xing, Y., Lu, H., Zhao, L. et al. Privacy and Security Issues in Mobile Medical Information Systems MMIS. Mobile Netw Appl 29, 762–773 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-024-02299-8
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-024-02299-8