Preserving the privacy of patient records in health monitoring systems

The goal of this chapter is to discuss the challenges of generic security protocols and platforms for securing Electronic Health Records (EHR) in general and for their adoption in shared care environments in particular. The chapter introduces various methods and security solutions based on existing protocols, discusses their potentials, and describes some experiences with their implementations. Amongst the main challenges that e-health technology faces, security is considered as one of the major obstacles to its deployment. The chapter proposes an authentication approach, referred to as Ubiquitous Health Trust Protocol (UHTP), which aims at minimizing the security risk associated with the remote access of EHRs using portable devices. In particular, the proposed approach has been used to create ways for secure collaboration providing a set of generic services such as read/write, authentication, and trust management, as well as advanced functionality for mobile access. The experience in adopting the approach using Java on the Android platform is described.