The Healthtech Declaration

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—nd it also involves many competing stakeholders and interests. To address the problems that arise in such a multifaceted field—omprised of physicians, IT professionals, management information specialists, computer scientists, medical 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-to-use—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.