Leveraging identity management interoperability in eHealth

Abstract

Many heterogeneous and highly specialized software applications for eHealth were implemented and deployed by diverse health organizations, such as public and private hospitals and health care centers. The rational management of these eHealth assets together with their efficient and interoperable integration represents today a major hitherto unresolved challenge for the health sector at a global level. One of the present implications is the serious interoperability issues that arise by the lack of widely accepted standards for the homogeneous integration of the diverse identity and authentication mechanisms used by the eHealth applications ecosystem. Unfortunately this has not yet been a major infrastructure concern for the eHealth context and thus constitutes a major road block for the realization of these applications full integration potential. In this work a high level model and some critical infrastructure components are proposed. Together with the Portuguese eID smart-card, allowed to delineate a novel and more flexible infrastructure for secure identity management and authentication services for eHealth. The secure privacy oriented identity infrastructure proposed fits well the highly demanding and specific needs of a heterogeneous and integrated modern identity infrastructure for eHealth applications, precisely because it provides strong foundations, upon which more reliable, secure, trustworthy and inter-operable eHealth applications can be built. © 2011 IEEE.