With a view to overcome the shortcomings of traditional Electronic Health Record (EHR) system so as to assure the interoperability by providing open access to sensitive health data, while still preserving personal data privacy, anonymity and avoiding data misuse, Decentralized Electronic Health Record System was developed. The aforementioned issue concerning traditional EHR system can be addressed by implication of emerging technology of the era namely Block chain, together with Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) which enables data sharing in decentralized and transactional fashion, thereby maintaining delicate balance between privacy and accessibility of electronic health records. A block chain based EHR system has been built for secure, efficient and interoperable access to medical records by both patients and doctors while preserving privacy of the sensitive patient’s information. Patients can easily and comprehensively access to their medical records across providers and treatment sites using unique properties of block chain and decentralized storage. A separate portal for both the patients and doctors has been built enabling the smart contracts to handle further interaction between doctors and patients. So, in this system, it is demonstrated how principles of decentralization and block chain architectures could contribute to EHR system using Ethereum smart contracts and IPFS to orchestrate a suitable system governing the medical record access while providing patients with comprehensive record review along with consideration for audit ability and data sharing.

Users share their personal devices with different entities in various circumstances. While prior research shed light on the broad reasons behind the sharing of mobile phones, there is a dearth of systematic study to understand the user's decision-making process and the underlying preferences and concerns in the context of phone sharing. To address these gaps, we designed a prototype that we leveraged to investigate the interplay between a user's relationship with sharees, preferences of sharing a subset of apps with a certain entity, perceived sensitivity of the apps being shared, and how these factors relate to their authentication behavior. We conducted a multi-session study with 50 participants from three countries (USA, Turkey, and Nepal), where the participants interacted with our prototype and took part in semi-structured interviews. The findings from our study revealed the need for phone sharing at a granular level, where we identified the factors that could influence a user's decision-making process in sharing. Our analysis unpacked the relation between a user's perceived sensitivity of apps being shared, and authentication behavior to protect information from unauthorized access. Overall, our findings advance the CSCW community's understanding of how the user attains a balance between privacy protection and the need for phone sharing.

With the growing adoption of digital technology in healthcare organizations, it is important to understand nursing professionals' behavior and challenges, and the corresponding privacy implications around digital technology use. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 participants (16 nursing professionals, and five nursing faculties) in the USA. In our study with nursing professionals, we explored how they used digital technology and protected sensitive health data at their workplace. We investigated their understanding of privacy breaches and possible consequences, the challenges they encountered to maintaining privacy, and their workarounds to deal with such issues. We looked into the support that professional nurses receive in the form of organizational training, and how they collaborate with the IT department at their institution to address technical issues. In addition, we shed light on the gap between their academic preparation and professional needs in the context of digital technology use and privacy protection, where we also interviewed five nursing faculties to get more in-depth understanding of this issue from the point of view of academia. Overall, our findings provide valuable insights for the CSCW community to better understand the challenges and privacy risks in digital technology use by nursing professionals, and lead to our recommendations to address these issues.

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