Authors:
Vassiliki Koufi
;
Flora Malamateniou
and
George Vassilacopoulos
Affiliation:
University of Piraeus, Greece
Keyword(s):
Emergency care, Personal Health Records, Cloud Computing, Web Services, Context-aware Security.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cardiovascular Technologies
;
Cloud Computing
;
Computing and Telecommunications in Cardiology
;
Confidentiality and Data Security
;
e-Health
;
Health Engineering and Technology Applications
;
Health Information Systems
;
Medical and Nursing Informatics
;
Platforms and Applications
Abstract:
Recently, there has been a remarkable upsurge in activity surrounding the adoption of Personal Health Records (PHRs). Since PHRs contain global patient information and not certain pieces collected by individual healthcare providers, they can be used as basic infrastructures for building and operating several important systems for both healthcare and the tax payers. Emergency medical systems (EMS) are among the most crucial ones as they involve a variety of activities which are performed from the time of a call to an ambulance service till the time of patient’s discharge from the emergency department of a hospital and are closely interrelated so that collaboration and coordination becomes a vital issue for patients and for emergency healthcare service performance. This paper is concerned with the development of a PHR-based EMS in a cloud computing environment and focuses on the security aspect of delivering this particular service. Although cloud-based services can prove important in
healthcare delivery, the inherent nature of medical service delivery underscores the need for ensuring that data security is better maintained. Moreover, high expectations for emergency care delivery can be achieved only if provider organizations select systems with the appropriate features, security being among the most prominent ones. Thus, the proposed EMS system comes with a suitable security mechanism in order to ensure secure access to medical information when and where needed. To this end, context-aware authorization has been embedded into the emergency care process, enabling authorization to be based not only on static rules and roles but also to be influenced by the process execution context to ensure precise and tight access control.
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