Empowerment of health professionals: how high level security education can raise awareness and confidence

Setting up networks among physicians and other health professionals in virtually any medical discipline is an important part of establishing eHealth world-wide. Medical research strategies nowadays advance diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge and guidelines allowing patients to benefits. Patient data and samples are among the most sensitive information and must carefully be protected according to rules of ethics and professional discretion as well as national and international privacy legislation. A lot has been said about "patient involvement, patient empowerment". What about health professionals? How can they be involved and empowered to address the paradigm shift towards a personalized health service provision? Information and communication technology (ICT), medical devices, and software applications are not among the topics health professionals typically deal with while being theoretically and practically trained to diagnose diseases and treat patients. An ICT-based training and information provision is required to update the ICT skills of health professionals. The German CAST association provides such an information platform where health professionals attend applied computer security education events. This article aims at describing how ICT and security education is provided to health professionals, and how these training courses are designed, structured, performed, and assessed.