A Security Assessment for Interactive Mobile Healthcare Systems: A Lifecycle Framework

Mobile health systems have become a central component of the health sector, reshaping how healthcare is accessed, delivered, and experienced, especially in developing countries with limited infrastructure. Mobile health systems are interactive and enable continuous interaction among patients, health professionals, and mobile technology. While these systems improve access to care and patient engagement, they also raise important concerns about how security is handled in highly interactive socio-technological environments. The current state of security assessment for mobile health systems tends to be biased towards technical security controls without addressing the required user interactions during mobile health system development in relation to providing security measures and evidence. This study addresses this gap by proposing a Phase–Role Interaction Security Assessment framework for mobile Health, namely, the PRISM-mH framework. The framework considers three dimensions: interaction-oriented security development lifecycle phases, the roles of the stakeholders involved, and evidence supporting the security requirements. With its help, security can be assessed continuously while taking into consideration the phases and role interactions. This framework is aimed at enhancing the visibility of security during user interactions, while also offering a systematic reference for researchers and practitioners to assess and enhance their security through the mobile health system lifecycle. Considering that PRISM-mH is proposed to address user interaction, technical control, and governance—factors that have not been considered consistently in past mobile health security assessments—this framework opens the door to more comprehensive and evidence-based security assessment, with a goal of enhancing the security position in mobile health development. The author argues that such a framework can help to propose a structure for an agile-driven approach for future studies and provide scoring-based guidance for informing the level of security maturity in mobile health technologies.