Big healthcare data: preserving security and privacy

Abstract

Big data has fundamentally changed the way organizations manage, analyze and leverage data in any industry. One of the most promising fields where big data can be applied to make a change is healthcare. Big healthcare data has considerable potential to improve patient outcomes, predict outbreaks of epidemics, gain valuable insights, avoid preventable diseases, reduce the cost of healthcare delivery and improve the quality of life in general. However, deciding on the allowable uses of data while preserving security and patient’s right to privacy is a difficult task. Big data, no matter how useful for the advancement of medical science and vital to the success of all healthcare organizations, can only be used if security and privacy issues are addressed. To ensure a secure and trustworthy big data environment, it is essential to identify the limitations of existing solutions and envision directions for future research. In this paper, we have surveyed the state-of-the-art security and privacy challenges in big data as applied to healthcare industry, assessed how security and privacy issues occur in case of big healthcare data and discussed ways in which they may be addressed. We mainly focused on the recently proposed methods based on anonymization and encryption, compared their strengths and limitations, and envisioned future research directions.