Understanding the Behavior, Challenges, and Privacy Risks in Digital Technology Use by Nursing Professionals

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With the growing adoption of digital technology in healthcare organizations, it is important to understand nursing professionals’ behavior and challenges, and the corresponding privacy implications around digital technology use. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 participants (16 nursing professionals, and five nursing faculties) in the USA. In our study with nursing professionals, we explored how they used digital technology and protected sensitive health data at their workplace. We investigated their understanding of privacy breaches and possible consequences, the challenges they encountered to maintaining privacy, and their workarounds to deal with such issues. We looked into the support that professional nurses receive in the form of organizational training, and how they collaborate with the IT department at their institution to address technical issues. In addition, we shed light on the gap between their academic preparation and professional needs in the context of digital technology use and privacy protection, where we also interviewed five nursing faculties to get more in-depth understanding of this issue from the point of view of academia. Overall, our findings provide valuable insights for the CSCW community to better understand the challenges and privacy risks in digital technology use by nursing professionals, and lead to our recommendations to address these issues.