Healthcare technology--sometimes called "healthtech" or "healthsec"--is enmeshed with security and privacy via usability, performance, and cost-effectiveness issues. It is multidisciplinary, distributed, and complex--and it also involves many competing stakeholders and interests. To address the problems that arise in such a multifaceted field--comprised of physicians, IT professionals, management information specialists, computer scientists, edical informaticists, and epidemiologists, to name a few--the Healthtech Declaration was initiated at the most recent USENIX Summit on Information Technologies for Health (Healthtech 2015) held in Washington, DC. This Healthtech Declaration includes an easy-touse--and easy-to-cite--checklist of key issues that anyone proposing a solution must consider (see "The Healthtech Declaration Checklist" sidebar). In this article, we provide the context and motivation for the declaration.
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The Healthtech Declaration