A framework for providing security to Personal Healthcare Records

Abstract

The Personal Healthcare Record (PHR) enables the patients or other authorized persons to manage their own medical records in a centralized way, and it (PHR) emerges as a patient-centric model which helps in the health information exchange. The PHRs can be stored in the server maintained by the hospital/clinic or other trusted third party including cloud provider. However, the data must be secure in the server. To provide security cryptographic service may be the solution. However, encryption and decryption of all the PHRs may degrade the processing performance of the system. So, we have proposed a framework that stores the data in two domains. One is public domain and another is private. The PHRs in the private domain needs more security than the public domain. The data (PHRs) of the private domain is further classified according to their class of sensitivities and provided security according to the sensitivity levels. This leads the enhancement of the processing performance of the system. The implementation issue has been described using necessary diagrams.