Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) unless otherwise noted)

Pakistan is a densely populated South Asian country facing numerous health challenges. With limited resources, the government is struggling to provide better healthcare facilities to the people. Like other developing countries, digital divide is another area of concern in Pakistan. To address the issue of digital divide, the government established e-libraries as a pilot project in 2018, which are functioning as community centers in the largest province of the country. This paper examines the role of these e-libraries in creating health awareness and providing health information to the public. The study utilized a qualitative research design based on focus group discussions with the head librarians of all 20 e-libraries. The findings revealed that e-libraries are actively involved in creating health-related awareness and connecting the public to health advisors. The e-libraries were engaged in four types of health-related activities, including seminars, awareness campaigns, open health camps, and special health days celebrations, with high attendance from the public. Attendees of these programs returned to librarians with additional health-related queries. The study suggests that there is a need for more liaison between the community and local health care institutions to make these programs more effective in helping individuals manage their health.

Threats against electronic medical and health records are on the rise. These threats include phishing attacks, malware and ransomware, encryption blind spots, cloud threats, and most important one is the internal threat caused by gaps in the level of awareness and knowledge of the employees and health practitioner of handling sensitive healthcare data. Cyber hygiene is a term used to describe both the technical and non-technical threats. In the same way, personal hygiene practices are used to maintain one’s own health and protect against diseases, cyber hygiene security practices are important in protecting and preserving sensitive electronic health information systems. In this paper, we report on the findings of a cyber hygiene study carried out in Kuwait with the objectives of assessing the level of awareness, knowledge and experience of physicians and healthcare professionals. The study identified seven different areas or barriers that impacted the cyber hygiene and the adoption of electronic health medical records in Kuwait. The seven areas include financial barriers, time, difficulty of using technology, lack of management support, negative attitude toward the use of electronic medical records, legal and ethical issues, as well as cultural barriers.

Despite older adults being one of the most important groups of users of eHealth services, including patient accessible electronic health records, these are claimed not to be designed to suit older users, and to not necessarily fulfill their information needs. User-centered design methods often utilized when developing eHealth services have also been claimed not to work well for older adults. This paper suggests an alternative way of collecting ideas and feedback on eHealth from older adults, by including open-ended questions in the data collection of larger studies on eHealth information behavior. When data are collected by methods like focus group interviews and surveys, older adults can be requested to envision an eHealth service that suits their needs. Results from studies in Finland are presented, and show that current eHealth services do not fulfill all information needs of older adults, as answers to the question in both focus group interviews and surveys contain practical suggestions for additional and more comprehensible information, easier ways of searching for needed information, and alternative channels for communication. Open-ended questions can be a cost-effective and timesaving way to help in the design and development of patient accessible electronic health records and other types of eHealth services.

History has repeatedly shown that when it comes to healthcare, there exist significant disparities across different sub-populations. Part of this problem is challenges with access to healthcare services and providers. In recent years, we have seen solutions emerge that attempt to address this issue, namely telehealth. But little to no work has been done to glean insights into factors contributing to lower access and whether telehealth adequately supports populations that struggle with physical access issues. In this paper, we present findings from an exploratory, cross-dataset analysis of healthcare access in Virginia, USA. We conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses lyses to determine correlations between socioeconomic factors and physical access. We found that population density significantly impacts physical access to healthcare. We also found that lower income communities in rural areas appear to be less satisfied with the quality of care and less likely to have adequate access to alternative options such as telehealth services. Our work has implications for research aimed at understanding healthcare access and practice that aims to derive solutions to close the healthcare access gap.