Healthcare organizations need secure clinical information systems to provide better quality medical services, increase access to medical records, and reduce the operative costs of business. What technologies do healthcare providers need? What roles should information technology (IT) specialists play in the design and implementation of secure medical information systems? Kotz et al. address these questions in this article.

The authors advocate constructive viewpoints: (1) healthcare providers ought to capitalize on the use of mobile devices, cloud services, and electronic health records (EHRs) for monitoring the conditions of patients; (2) IT specialists should take more responsibility in the design of secure systems that provide privacy and safe access to EHRs from different computers and medical and smart devices; (3) medical health technology inventors should develop robust security policies for collecting, storing, accessing, and sharing the medical records of patients; and (4) healthcare organizations require steadfast and reliable medical information systems for the diagnosis, the cure, and decisions about patients.

Indisputably, medical IT developers are confronted with many real-world challenges today. It is not easy to design and implement systems for handling all current, surfacing, and unknown future security vulnerabilities and threats. To help build trust in patients, managers of medical systems should be logging and auditing all legal and illegal access to patient medical records. Doctors, health caregivers, and systems administrators of medical information systems should read about the inspiring security issues discussed in this paper. Together, patients, healthcare organizations, and IT experts can help to develop effective solutions to security problems.