Seamless Access to Healthcare Folders with Strong Privacy Guarantees

Abstract

During the past decade, many countries launched ambitious Electronic Health Record (EHR) programs with the objective to increase the quality of care while decreasing its cost. Pervasive healthcare aims itself at making healthcare information securely available anywhere and anytime, even in disconnected environments (e.g., at patient home). Current server-based EHR solutions badly tackle disconnected situations and fail in providing ultimate security guarantees for the patients. The solution proposed in this paper capitalizes on a new hardware device combining a secure microcontroller (similar to a smart card chip) with a large external Flash memory on a USB key form factor. Embedding the patient folder as well as a database system and a web server in such a device gives the opportunity to manage securely a healthcare folder in complete autonomy. This paper proposes also a new way of personalizing access control policies to meet patient’s privacy concerns with minimal assistance of practitioners. While both proposals are orthogonal, their integration in the same infrastructure allows building trustworthy pervasive healthcare folders.