Confidential Knowledge Research Articles

Study on good clinical practices among researchers in a tertiary healthcare institute in India.

Good clinical practice (GCP) is put in place to protect human participants in clinical trials as well as to ensure the quality of research. Non-adherence to these guidelines can produce research that may not meet the standards set by the scientific community. Therefore, it must be ensured that researchers are well-versed in the GCP. But not much is known about the knowledge and practices of the GCP in the medical colleges of North India. To assess the knowledge and practices of researchers about GCP and analyze these with respect to the demographics of participants. This is a cross-sectional study. A self-structured questionnaire about GCP, after expert validations, was circulated among researchers, at a tertiary healthcare institute, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Rishikesh. A total of 59 individuals, who were selected by universal sampling, participated in the study. All healthcare workers who have been investigators of Institutional Ethics Committee-approved research projects, except residents and faculty, and are still a part of the institute have been included in the study. The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of AIIMS, Rishikesh. We used descriptive analysis and the Chi-squared test to analyze data. P value < 0.05 was considered significant. Out of 59 participants, only 11 (18.6%) were certified for GCP. Most of the participants (64.4%) had "Average" knowledge, 33.9% had "Good" knowledge and 1.7% had "Poor" knowledge. Only 49% of participants had satisfactory practices related to GCP. There was a significant difference in the knowledge based on the current academic position for the items assessing knowledge of institutional review board (P = 0.010), confidentiality & privacy (P = 0.011), and participant safety & adverse events (P < 0.001). There was also a significant difference in knowledge of research misconduct (P = 0.024) and participant safety & adverse events (P = 0.011) based on certification of GCP. There was a notable difference in the practices related to recruitment & retention on the basis of current academic position (P < 0.001) and certification of GCP (P = 0.023). We also observed a considerable difference between the knowledge and practices of GCP among the participants (P = 0.013). Participants have basic knowledge of GCP but show a lack thereof in certain domains of GCP. This can be addressed by holding training sessions focusing on these particular domains.

Nurses' Awareness of Patient Privacy and Confidentiality in Benghazi Medical Centre (BMC): A Cross-sectional Study

Background:- Respect for the privacy of patients and the confidentiality of their information, personal data is a fundamental principle of patient rights. All healthcare providers, especially physicians and nurses play a crucial role as guardians of patient safety and rights therefore this study aimed to assess the knowledge and awareness of patients’ rights among nurses at the Benghazi Medical Center.&#x0D; Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted with 184 nurses at the gynecology and obstetrics department of the Benghazi Medical Center, using a self-administrated questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of three parts: personal characteristics, and the knowledge towards privacy part (21 statements), and confidentiality (11 statements). Data analysis was carried out using SPSS version 23. Descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations) were used to describe the knowledge of privacy and confidentiality among nurses. A relation test was used to measure the association between privacy and confidentiality with personal data. Also, statistical significance was set at a P- value of &lt;0.05.&#x0D; Results: 67.9% of the nurses reported that they had experienced patient rights. The knowledge about privacy among nurses in the target hospital was high, and the most common knowledge was: during the examination, treatment, and care, all healthcare professionals should be careful about the protection of patient privacy (91.8%) and nursing care to protect privacy in the work environment (91.3%). Concerning confidentality, nurses had a high level of knowledge in general, and the highest level of knowledge was in the statement ‘patients must get all kind of health service in an environment that is suitable for confidentiality’. The result found there was no association between personal characteristics and privacy and confidentiality.&#x0D; Conclusion:- It was concluded that nurses commonly encounter patient rights issues in their workplace. However, the majority of the nurses who participated in the study had a very good level of knowledge about privacy and confidentiality. Age, educational level or length of working experience was insignificantly associated with the level of knowledge of privacy and confidentiality.

Evaluation of the extent and demanding roles of ethical hacking in cybersecurity

&lt;p&gt;A permitted effort to acquire unlawful connection to computing systems, programs, or information is referred to as ethical hacking. Software developers must check for flaws, compartment focus, define needs and objectives, and create a method that makes the most of their resources. The rationale for this kind of vulnerability evaluation has a direct impact on the overall assessment’s estimate. More specifically, it is known that technological gadgets are necessary to prevent computer criminals from breaking into web applications to control their operations and gain access to confidential knowledge for unintended objectives. This research study provides an analysis to determine the scope and challenging responsibilities of ethical hacking employed in cyber security. Network monitoring is a legitimate need in which authorized developers attempt to breach a company’s frameworks or arrangements for the convenience of the owners to uncover security flaws. It provides information on how organizations may use computer forensics, such as vulnerability assessments using open-source devices, to safeguard their program’s administrators and operations. Numerous tools have been explored for security auditing of the networks which involves Nmap, Nessus, Brutus, Acunetix, etc. As a result, safeguards were put in place to identify these flaws and protect sensitive data from cyber-attacks. Ethical hacking has a bright future for detecting system or application vulnerabilities effectively. Nevertheless, tools utilized in the cyber security field for network or computer application secrecy have some limits namely growing complexity, high cost, security measures restrictions, etc. Hence, there is a wide scope to build new cost-effective cyber secrecy tools for the enhanced secrecy of user data in real time.&lt;/p&gt;

Women's Attitudes, Concerns, and Experiences About Confidentially In Maternity Health Care Settings in Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia

Background: Global health agendas emphasize improving newborn and maternal health and ensuring maternal confidentiality. Confidentiality is particularly important for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. The patient’s concern about keeping confidentiality has a drastic impact on their trust. Aim: This study examines women's knowledge of, and attitudes toward, confidentiality in maternal health care settings. The study also determined women's concerns about keeping medical information confidential. Patients and Methods: analytical, cross-sectional study. The study was done at the maternal inpatient and outpatient departments in 3 public and 3 private hospitals in Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia. The enrolled 383 participants from various disciplines were randomly selected. Data collection was conducted from June 1 to November 10, 2021, utilizing the Confidentiality Self-Report Instrument. Results: Seventy-six percent (76%) of the participants had a good understanding and knowledge of confidentiality. In terms of patient experiences with confidentiality and disclosure, (63.7 %) of participants rated it as well. Confidentiality concerns significantly affected the decision to seek care in (78.1%) of the participants. Participants' attitudes were positive about regulations relating to patient confidentiality, with (92.4%) of the participants believing it is very important. There was a significant correlation between experiences with disclosure and the effect of confidentiality concerns on seeking care. Conclusion: Most of the patients in the maternity wards had concerns that prevented them from providing all of the required information. 2) The majority of participants believed that regulations regarding patient confidentiality were extremely important. 3) Disclosure experiences and confidentiality concerns were significantly correlated when it came to seeking treatment.

Assessing the credibility of information sources in times of uncertainty: online debate about Finland's NATO membership

PurposeThis article aims to elaborate the context-sensitive nature of credibility assessment by examining how such judgments are made in online discussion in times of uncertainty caused by Finland's intent to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in spring 2022.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical findings draw on the qualitative content analysis of 3,324 posts submitted to a Finnish online discussion in February–March 2022. It was examined how the participants of online discussion assess the credibility of information sources referred to in debates on the NATO membership. It is assumed that the believability of the author of information is indicative of his or her expert power, for example based on the credentials of a scholar, while the credibility of information content, for example the provision of factual evidence is indicative of the source's informational power.FindingsPolitical decision-makers, particularly the President of Finland were assessed as most credible information sources, due to their access to confidential knowledge and long-time experience in politics. The credibility assessments differed more strongly while judging the believability of researchers. On the one hand, their expertise was praised; on the other hand, doubts were presented about their partiality. Fellow participants of online discussion were assessed most negatively because information sources of these types are associated with low expert and informational power.Research limitations/implicationsAs the study concentrated on credibility assessments made in a Finnish online discussion group, the findings cannot be extended to concern the credibility judgments occurring information in other contexts.Originality/valueThe study is among the first to characterize the role of expert and informational power in credibility assessment in times of uncertainty.

Knowledge, practices, and patterns of data confidentiality among pharmacists in a developing country

BackgroundIncreased application of electronic health information systems led to the buildup of patient information and facilitated access to this data. Consequently, the confidentiality of this information became an ethical challenge to medical teams' members including pharmacists. However, no study has been conducted to assess pharmacists’ knowledge or practices of data confidentiality. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the current practices and knowledge of pharmacists concerning data confidentiality. MethodsThis was a cross sectional study that included clinical pharmacists in tertiary hospitals and health care centers in Jordan. Data was collected through phone or face to face interviews using a data collection sheet. All continuous data was presented as median ± interquartile range (IQR) and categorical data as frequency (%). One way Chi square was used to check significant differences among categorical groups. Predictors that may affect knowledge and behavior scores were screened using simple linear regression. ResultsA total of 388 pharmacists were interviewed with a mean age of 39.59 ± 8.32 years, with an average experience of 12.55 ± 7.30 years. Pharmacists relied on their personal experience to resolve ethical dilemmas (n = 274, 70.3%), and when they seek advice, their work colleagues (n = 180, 46.4%) %), followed by the head of departments (144 n; 37.1%), were the main source of advice on ethical issues. The overall median knowledge score of pharmacists about data confidentiality was 2.0 out of 5.0 (IQR = 2.0). A considerable percentage of the pharmacists was willing to share information with family members without asking for permission from the patient (n = 98, 25.3%). Pharmacists had a median behavior score of 3.5 out of 4.0 (IQR = 0.4) regarding practices related to data confidentiality, where the majority of them handled medical information from the patient with great confidentiality (304 n, 78.4%), and 85.8% of them (n = 333) gave patient's sexual diseases-related medical information the highest confidentiality. However, based on univariate and multivariate linear regression analysis, none of the examined sociodemographic variables significantly predicted pharmacists’ knowledge or behaviors (P > 0.05). ConclusionPharmacists are aware of the importance of confidentiality issues of their patients. However, a number of gaps in their knowledge and practices of data confidentiality were identified. Training that targets these gaps in their knowledge, and rectifies incorrect practices is needed during university education and as part of their continuous medical education.

Selected Developments in Biotechnology Law and the Biotechnology Industry

Selected Developments in Biotechnology Law and the Biotechnology Industry

Combinatorial Algorithms for String Sanitization

String data are often disseminated to support applications such as location-based service provision or DNA sequence analysis. This dissemination, however, may expose sensitive patterns that model confidential knowledge (e.g., trips to mental health clinics from a string representing a user’s location history). In this article, we consider the problem of sanitizing a string by concealing the occurrences of sensitive patterns, while maintaining data utility, in two settings that are relevant to many common string processing tasks. In the first setting, we aim to generate the minimal-length string that preserves the order of appearance and frequency of all non-sensitive patterns. Such a string allows accurately performing tasks based on the sequential nature and pattern frequencies of the string. To construct such a string, we propose a time-optimal algorithm, TFS-ALGO. We also propose another time-optimal algorithm, PFS-ALGO, which preserves a partial order of appearance of non-sensitive patterns but produces a much shorter string that can be analyzed more efficiently. The strings produced by either of these algorithms are constructed by concatenating non-sensitive parts of the input string. However, it is possible to detect the sensitive patterns by “reversing” the concatenation operations. In response, we propose a heuristic, MCSR-ALGO, which replaces letters in the strings output by the algorithms with carefully selected letters, so that sensitive patterns are not reinstated, implausible patterns are not introduced, and occurrences of spurious patterns are prevented. In the second setting, we aim to generate a string that is at minimal edit distance from the original string, in addition to preserving the order of appearance and frequency of all non-sensitive patterns. To construct such a string, we propose an algorithm, ETFS-ALGO, based on solving specific instances of approximate regular expression matching. We implemented our sanitization approach that applies TFS-ALGO, PFS-ALGO, and then MCSR-ALGO, and experimentally show that it is effective and efficient. We also show that TFS-ALGO is nearly as effective at minimizing the edit distance as ETFS-ALGO, while being substantially more efficient than ETFS-ALGO.

Privacy preserving frequent itemset mining: Maximizing data utility based on database reconstruction

The process of frequent itemset mining (FIM) within large-scale databases plays a significant part in many knowledge discovery tasks, where, however, potential privacy breaches are possible. Privacy preserving frequent itemset mining (PPFIM) has thus drawn increasing attention recently, where the ultimate goal is to hide sensitive frequent itemsets (SFIs) so as to leave no confidential knowledge uncovered in the resulting database. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the proposed methods for PPFIM were merely based on database perturbation, which may result in a significant loss of data utility in order to conceal all SFIs. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a database reconstruction-based algorithm for PPFIM (DR-PPFIM) that can not only achieve a high degree of privacy but also afford a reasonable data utility. In DR-PPFIM, all SFIs with related frequent itemsets are first identified for removing in the pre-sanitize process by implementing a devised sanitize method. With the remained frequent itemsets, a novel database reconstruction scheme is proposed to reconstruct an appropriate database, where the concepts of inverse frequent itemset mining (IFIM) and database extension are efficiently integrated. In this way, all SFIs are able to be hidden under the same mining threshold while maximizing the data utility of the synthetic database as much as possible. Moreover, we also develop a further hiding strategy in DR-PPFIM to further decrease the significance of SFIs with the purpose of reducing the risk of disclosing confidential knowledge. Extensive comparative experiments are conducted on real databases to demonstrate the superiority of DR-PPFIM in terms of maximizing the utility of data and resisting potential threats.

A privacy-preserving model for multi-agent propositional planning

Over the last years, the planning community has formalised several models and approaches to multi-agent (MA) propositional planning. One of the main motivations in MA planning is that some or all agents have private knowledge that cannot be communicated to other agents during the planning process and the plan execution. We argue that the existing models of the multi-agent planning task do not maintain the agents’ privacy when a (strict) subset of the involved agents share confidential knowledge, or when the identity/existence of at least one agent is confidential. In this paper, first we propose a model of the MA-planning tasks that preserves the privacy of the involved agents when this happens. Then we investigate an algorithm based on best first search for our model that uses some new heuristics providing a trade-off between accuracy and agents’ privacy. Finally, an experimental study compares the effectiveness of using the proposed heuristics.

How supplier knowledge impacts on organizational capabilities and willingness

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to conduct a survey on the knowledge for supplier correlation with their capabilities and willingness as segmentation criteria. There are many contexts for sharing knowledge. What are more beneficial contexts?Design/methodology/approachAfter developing the research hypothesis, a structured questionnaire was adopted to gather primary data from suppliers. The draft questionnaire was sent to five academic and industry experts to comment on the content. Received feedback was used to change the layout of the questionnaire. Instead of the traditional partial least squares, the state-of- art consistent partial least square technique was put into practice.FindingsBy definition, knowledge for supplier has a large impact on supplier capabilities. The Important-Performance Matrix Analysis (IPMA) prioritizes the indicators and suggests to focus on knowledge sharing about manufacturing processes, development expertise and marketing expertise. Results showed that supplier willingness for sharing confidential knowledge and longtime relationship depends on development programs.Practical implicationsHaving a communication mechanism for each of the partnerships’ specific contexts was suggested to maximize the knowledge flow.Originality/valueFor maximizing the knowledge flow and studying the effect on the segmentation criteria such as capability and willingness, the main contribution of the paper is to survey the supplier knowledge in depth. The IPMA was implemented to highlight the indicators.

How Do the Professional Lives of Family Therapists Affect their Private Relationships: A Qualitative Study

This article is based on a qualitative research project about how the professional lives of family therapists affect their private relationships. The overarching research question was: How does your professional work as a family therapist affect your private relationships? To answer this question, semi‐structured qualitative interviews were conducted with four therapists from two different Family Counseling Services. Through the use of interpretative phenomenological analysis, three main findings were identified: (1) family therapists’ knowledge and values are a basis for interpersonal encounters; (2) participants describe resonance in relation to clients’ stories; and (3) therapists can be challenged in managing confidential knowledge particularly where they belong to the same communities as clients. The study also explores societal expectations and discourses that accompany the role of therapist, which can affect therapists’ freedom of movement in their private lives. These issues are discussed in relation to family therapy theory and relevant research.

Midwives\u2019 and patients\u2019 perspectives on disrespect and abuse during labor and delivery care in Ethiopia: a qualitative study

BackgroundIt is increasingly recognized that disrespect and abuse of women during labor and delivery is a violation of a woman’s rights and a deterrent to the use of life-saving, facility-based labor and delivery services. In Ethiopia, rates of skilled birth attendance are still only 28% despite a recent dramatic national scale up in the numbers of trained providers and facilities. Concerns have been raised that womens’ perceptions of poor quality of care and fear of mistreatment might contribute to this low utilization. This study examines the experiences of disrespect and abuse in maternal care from the perspectives of both providers and patients.MethodsWe conducted 45 in-depth interviews at four health facilities in Debre Markos, Ethiopia with midwives, midwifery students, and women who had given birth within the past year. Students and providers also took a brief quantitative survey on patients’ rights during labor and delivery and responded to clinical scenarios regarding the provision of stigmatized reproductive health services.ResultsWe find that both health care providers and patients report frequent physical and verbal abuse as well as non-consented care during labor and delivery. Providers report that most abuse is unintended and results from weaknesses in the health system or from medical necessity. We uncovered no evidence of more systematic types of abuse involving detention of patients, bribery, abandonment or ongoing discrimination against particular ethnic groups. Although health care providers showed good basic knowledge of confidentiality, privacy, and consent, training on the principles of responsive and respectful care, and on counseling, is largely absent. Providers indicated that they would welcome related practical instruction. Patient responses suggest that women are aware that their rights are being violated and avoid facilities with reputations for poor care.ConclusionsOur results suggest that training on respectful care, offered in the professional ethics modules of the national midwifery curriculum, should be strengthened to include greater focus on counseling skills and rapport-building. Our findings also indicate that addressing structural issues around provider workload should complement all interventions to improve midwives’ interpersonal interactions with women if Ethiopia is to increase provision of respectful, patient-centered maternity care.

Designing a Tool to Assess Medical Students’ Knowledge and Attitudes of Confidentiality and Disclosure of Patient Information

Background and purpose: Respecting confidentiality of documents and medical information about individuals, as one of the most important issues in medicine, guarantees patients' trust in the health system. Therefore, this study is an attemp to design a valid and reliable tool to assess knowledge and attitudes of medical students about the principles of confidentiality and disclosure of patient information. Methods: To design the questionnaire, a comprehensive review of literature was conducted. Since to the best of our knowledge, there was no valid and reliable tool, a 34-questions questionnaire consisting of two sections of knowledge and attitude was designed. Then, face and content validity of the questionnaire was investigated by expert opinion. Finally, content validity index (CVI), content validity ratio (CVR) and item usability index (IUI) were calculated, and the reliability of the instrument was measured by Cronbach’s Alpha. Then, the final questionnaire was assessed by faculty members of ethics and medical education (n=10) for simplicity, relevance, and clarity of the questions. Lastly, the questionnaire was distributed among medical interns (n=40)and its reliability was examined. Afterwards, the questionnaire was distributed among 160 medical interns, and the reliability and validity of its structure was evaluated. Results: The designed questionnaire CVI and CVR were 0.80 and 0.81 for knowledge and 0.78 and 0.83 for attitude sections. All the questions were confirmed as valid and reliable. The validity of the questionnaire for knowledge and attitude sections were 0.79 and 0.82, respectively. Conclusions: Validity and reliability of all the designed questions (17 in each section) were confirmed. Keywords: confidentiality, disclosure of patients’ information, validity, reliability, questionnaire

Device- and service profiles for integrated or systems based on open standards

Abstract Integrated OR systems nowadays are closed and proprietary, so that the interconnection of components from third-party vendors is only possible with high time and cost effort. An integrated operating theatre with open interfaces, giving clinical operators the opportunity to choose individual medical devices from different manufacturers, is currently being developed in the framework of the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) funded project OR.NET [1]. Actual standards and concepts regarding technical feasibility and accreditation process do not cope with the requirements for modular integration based on an open standard. Therefore, strategies as well as service and device profiles to enable a procedure for risk management and certifiability are in the focus of the project work. Amongst others, a concept for User Interface Profiles (UI-Profiles) has been conceived in order to describe medical device functions and the entire user interface regarding Human-Machine-Interaction (HMI) characteristics with the aim to identify human-induced risks of central user interfaces. The use of standardized device and service profiles shall allow the manufacturers to integrate their medical devices in the OR.NET network, without disclosing the medical devices’ risk analysis and related confidential knowledge or proprietary information.

Privacy preservation through a greedy, distortion-based rule-hiding method

Various data mining techniques can be used to discover useful knowledge from large collections of data. However, there is a risk of disclosing sensitive information when data is shared between different organizations. The balance between legitimate mining needs and the protection of confidential knowledge when data is released or shared must be carefully managed. In this paper, we study privacy preservation in association rule mining. A new distortion-based method is proposed which hides sensitive rules by removing some items in a database to reduce the support or confidence of sensitive rules below specified thresholds. In order to minimize side effects on knowledge, the information on non-sensitive itemsets contained by each transaction is used to sort the supporting transactions. The candidates that contain fewer non-sensitive itemsets are selected for modification preferably. In order to reduce the distortion degree on data, the minimum number of transactions that need to be modified to conceal a sensitive rule is derived. Comparative experiments on real datasets showed that the new method can achieve satisfactory results with fewer side effects and data loss.

Minimization of Side Effects of Knowledge Hiding Based On Association Rule Mining

Privacy is very important in Data Mining. Association rule mining, is a important technique, has already been applied in a wide range of areas. Large databases cannot be secured by encryption or other techniques because of complexities. These security issues can be divided into two categories: data hiding and knowledge hiding. This paper deals with the problem of association rule mining which preserves the confidentiality of each database i.e. Knowledge hiding. Knowledge hiding is concerned with the sanitization of confidential knowledge from the data. There are many methods to solve this problem. The one, presented in the paper is called support-based and confidence-based blocking schemes. Apriori algorithm is used for mining rule from database. Knowledge hiding is achieved using ISL and DSR. The improvement over sensitive rule hiding is proposed to offer more accuracy and security with smaller negative impact. In ever changing business environment like enterprises e-businesses, the old fashioned disclosure and database inference protection techniques are not capable to ensure complete data privacy. Privacy is important for the on line disclosure of private information Organizations should be able to evaluate the risk of disclosing information and should adopt new more efficient approaches for information disclosure control, in order to maintain their competitive edge in the market. Not only the data but also the hidden knowledge in the data should be made secure. The sensitive information can be extracted in the form of association rules with association rule mining tools. But this can jeopardize the privacy of the customers. Some other rule could be very critical for the company itself such as buying patterns of very rich customers. For example, an Internet based company may give up selling hardware and may concentrate on selling books and videos. Therefore a rule relating the customer buying patterns of hardware may no longer be sensitive for that company. It is desirable to apply a trivial algorithm that hides data by deleting it randomly. Data Mining is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods from statistics and artificial intelligence but also database management. Privacy has become an important issue in Data Mining. Many methods have been brought out to solve this problem. This paper focuses on the problem of association rule mining, which hides the knowledge from each database. This paper reviews the major method of knowledge hiding. Association rule mining, as a very important technique, has already been applied in a wide range of areas. Knowledge hiding is concerned with the sanitization of confidential knowledge from the data. As a result of association rule mining, many useful association rules will be discovered, but at the same time, many privacy rules will also be exposed which do not want others to know. To solve this, limit the mining process, in order to keep these sensitive rules being hidden. There are so many methods to solve this problem. The one that is covered in the paper is just one kind of them, called support-based and confidence-based blocking schemes. Algorithm used For Knowledge Hiding is ISL algorithm or DSR algorithm (2). The main disadvantage of a block in algorithm is the fact that the dataset, apart from the blocked values, is not distorted. Thus, an adversary can disclose the hidden rules by identifying those generating item sets that contain question marks and lead to rules with a maximum confidence that lies above the minimum confidence threshold. If the number of these rules is small then the probability of identifying the sensitive ones among them becomes high. To avoid this problem, a method for selectively removing individual values from a database is introduced to prevent the discovery of a set of rules, while preserving the data for other applications. The problem of building privacy preserving algorithms is considered for one category of data mining techniques, the association rule mining. New metrics is introduced in order to demonstrate how security issues can be taken into consideration in the general framework of association rule mining (1).

Hiding Sensitive Association Rules by Sanitizing

The goal of knowledge discovery is to extract hidden or useful unknown knowledge from databases, while the objective of knowledge hiding is to prevent certain confidential data or knowledge from being extracted through data mining techniques. Hiding sensitive association rules is focused. The side-effects of the existing data mining technology are investigated. The problem of sensitive association rule hiding is described formally. The representative sanitizing strategies for sensitive association rule hiding are discussed.

Knowledge of confidentiality, consent and information disclosure is not affected by position or experience in adult critical care

Teaching of medical ethical issues including confidentiality and consent have long been a small part of the medical curriculum. These issues are more complex in an ICU where patients may lack capacity. Documents such as Good Medical Practice 1995, Confidentiality 2009 and the Mental Capacity Act 2005 give guidance to medical professionals in these matters in the UK.

The Dynamics of Relational Quality in Co-Development Alliances

Co-development alliances are formed to create new capabilities (technologies, products, services, processes, etc.) that partner organizations need in order to reach their goals. They involve the combination of competencies, and other intangible assets. These alliances typically face a high level of risks in terms of undesired leakages of confidential knowledge or failure to achieve the expected development. Relational quality, an important consideration in all alliances, is particularly key. Without it, partners might not be open enough to combine their knowledge effectively with the partners’. This article proposes a framework for defining, assessing, and monitoring relational quality in co-development alliances.