Private cloud solution for Securing and Managing Patient Data in Rural Healthcare System

Abstract

Rural healthcare system in India is managing patient data in a traditional paper based system. Most of the rural hospitals in India are lacking in resources to maintain and manage the patient health data. As the world moves towards digitization, one of the key challenges in developing countries like India is in making the healthcare data accessible from rural to urban in digital form. Advancement in IT technology in healthcare sector has made it possible to maintain and manage the patient data in digital form in all levels of healthcare system. Cloud computing has emerged as a main in providing healthcare IT solution. Therefore, rural healthcare organizations should move towards building their own private cloud infrastructure which could be an excellent solution for the country's needs to have improved healthcare in rural areas. In private cloud, medical data is stored in databases in which some of the data in a medical database is sensitive in nature and access to this data should be limited to authorized persons. In this paper we propose a secure cloud architecture by building private cloud. The proposed private cloud architecture makes use of two database one for storing medical record and another for key. To reduce the risk of the health information leakage and safeguard the health data, hash and the encryption operation are performed before transmitting to the cloud database. With this technique, path for a third party to obtain the sensitive information stored in the cloud is being blocked. Therefore the proposed framework provides better secured services to the users.