Enhancing Security and Privacy of Healthcare Data using XML Schema

Abstract

Information security and privacy in the health care sector is an issue of growing importance. Widespread use of digital data in health care industry has provided potentially immeasurable benefits by instant access to patient information practically from anywhere in the world. Connecting HIS to the network and making EHR available over the Internet put the data vulnerable to security threats and risk the privacy of patients. For the storage and exchange of health care data, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is widely used. This paper presents a survey on security and privacy of health care data and details about the paper-less hospitals, risks to the privacy and security of health data due to digitization. Further the paper presents XML and its security technologies for the security and privacy of health care data. But these are having many challenges. Dealing with those challenges, the paper presents how XML Schema exploiting the capabilities of XML can be used to enhance the security and privacy of health care data.