Securing Linked Patient Data in the Cloud

Abstract

With recent healthcare legislation in the United States mandating the move to electronic healthcare records, the healthcare industry will need the scalable solutions provided by cloud computing. At the same time, healthcare providers could move their data to semantic systems to enable efficient knowledge reengineering and integration of patient data to improve patient care and support evidence based medicine. However, healthcare organizations have a conflicting legal and ethical requirement of keeping strict control of the personal health information. Therefore, to effectively secure semantically linked patient data in the cloud, identifiable literal values must be encrypted. Multi-user access and the minimum access principle requires a key storage strategy as dynamic as the semantically linked data itself. We propose a 4-service architecture for securing semantic data: application service, data service, key storage service, and authentication service. If properly implemented, the code for this architecture can be open-source, and also satisfy all the requirements of healthcare organizations.