Security and Privacy Issues in Ehealthcare Systems: Towards Trusted Services

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a widespread availability of electronic healthcare data record (EHR) systems. Vast amounts of health data were generated in the process of treatment in medical centers such hospitals, clinics, or other institutions. To improve the quality of healthcare service, EHRs could be potentially shared by a variety of users. This results in significant privacy issues that should be addressed to make the use of EHR practical. In fact, despite the recent research in designing standards and regulations directives concerning security and privacy in EHR systems, it is still, however, not completely settled out the privacy challenges. In this paper, a systematic literature review was conducted concerning the privacy issues in electronic healthcare systems. More than 50 original articles were selected to study the existing security approaches and figure out the used security models. Also, a novel Context-aware Access Control Security Model (CARE) is proposed to capture the scenario of data interoperability and support the security fundamentals of healthcare systems along with the capability of providing fine-grained access control.