State-of-the-art in eHealthcare Security and Privacy

Abstract

The patients’ medical records contain sensitive information of the individuals, whose unwanted disclosure may harm their personal life. In the e-Healthcare environment, medical records are distributed and shared among various medical and non-medical organizations. This creates problems in providing sufficient confidentiality and integrity to the medical data. As a result, security and privacy of patients’ data becomes more complex in today’s decentralized, looselycoupled and service-oriented systems. This paper presents various application models and architectures that provide security and privacy to patients’ personal and medical data in eHealthcare Systems. The models are applicable to healthcare services to ensure security and privacy to users’ data and give control of the data to the authorized users of the medical organizations based on the organizations policies and privacy preferences of the patients.