Leveraging semantic context to establish access controls for secure cloud-based electronic health records

Abstract

With the continuous growth of cloud-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and medical data, medical organizations are particularly concerned about storing patient data to provide fast services while adhering to privacy and security concerns. Existing EHR systems often face challenges in handling heterogeneous data and maintaining good performance with data growth. These systems mostly use relational databases or partially store data in a knowledge graph, making it challenging to handle big data and allowing flexible schema expansion. Hence, there is a need to address these problems. This paper provides a solution by proposing a novel graph-based EHR system integrating Attribute-Based Encryption and Semantic Web Technologies to ensure fine-grained EHR field-level security of patient records. Our approach leverages semantic context to query through a knowledge graph that stores encrypted medical data in the nodes, making it possible to handle heterogeneous data while ensuring optimal performance and preserving patient privacy.