A W3H2 Analysis of Security and Privacy Issues in Telemedicine: A Survey Study

Technological advances have made notable changes in the way healthcare services can be received and delivered today. Telemedicine is a form of virtual healthcare service that is convenient in context of time commitments, cost, and in-person availability. Despite its benefits, the adoption of telemedicine remains challenged with technology constraints, including security and privacy issues that pose risks. Existing research literature shows that there have been some prior survey studies on the security and privacy risks in telemedicine systems. However, none of these previous works have holistically surveyed the telemedicine security and privacy issues, using their networking layer locations, their causes, and their potential impacts on information flow. In this research study, we survey existing works on telemedicine security plus privacy, and come up with a unique way of classifying the surveyed literature using a noteworthy W3H2 analysis approach, which reviews and organizes the prior literature in terms of the locations, causes, potential impacts, and remedies related to the telemedicine security issues. We also discuss existing research gaps plus open research directions on the topic. The highlight of this study is our nifty W3H2 analysis approach, which makes use of simple yet notable research questions, as well as the seven layered OSI network architecture model, unlike previous survey studies on telemedicine security. We end up creating a multi-layer, novel taxonomy framework for effective presentation plus categorization of our surveyed literature.