Vision & Ethics

Dysphagia pathophysiology is complex and dysphagia sufferers are managed by different multi-disciplinary teams who are increasingly gaining access to HRM for biomechanically-based diagnosis of swallowing disorders.

Swallow Gateway’s vision is to provide a secure online environment allowing clinicians and researchers to reliably analyze their HRM studies, to store other relevant information and to communicate effectively with each other. Thus, enabling multi-level interactions; from discussions around individual cases under management through to international multi-center clinical collaborations and deglutology education.

Transfer of personal data should take place in accordance with the requirements of established privacy regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In order to meet this requirement data subjects must explicitly consent to the proposed transfer of their data to the Swallow Gateway online service for analysis of swallow function.

Swallow Gateway™ respects the fundamental principles of ethics and privacy. All information collected by this site will be used in accordance with the Flinders University Privacy Policy, details of which can be found at www.flinders.edu.au/privacy.

No account holder information or information uploaded to Swallow Gateway is available on the public domain.

Data is encrypted and stored in Microsoft’s Azure Data Centre in Melbourne, Australia and Sydney, Australia.

Additionally, the following safeguards also aid security of data:

• Swallow Gateway™ utilizes Microsoft Azure Cloud Services for security management and advanced threat protection.
• Swallow Gateway™ only allows sharing of study data and relevant files amongst account holders who are pre-agreed contacts.
• Users have the option to share the data generated by Swallow Gateway™ analysis in de-identified form.
• All Swallow Gateway™ user accounts are password protected.
• Swallow Gateway™ does not use cookies or local storage to store personal data.
• Swallow Gateway™ encrypts data in transit to the browser. Swallow Gateway™ enforces TLS 1.2 as a minimum and uses HSTS preloading.
• Swallow Gateway™ encrypts data at rest using AES 256.
• Preventions in place against clickjacking, cross-site scripting, man-in-the-middle attacks, SSL/TLS stripping, MIME Sniffing and SQL injection.
• Continuous data replication to avoid loss of data from natural disasters.
• Swallow Gateway™ advises account holders that de-identification alone may not negate privacy risks; Swallow Gateway™ users should therefore seek their own advice regarding the sufficiency of the above safeguards and the need for additional controls.