Privacy-Friendly Management of Electronic Health Records in the eHealth Context

Introduction

Electronic health records (EHRs) are becoming the core part of the official healthcare reforms in many western countries. They represent collections of health-related information of patients that are stored in an electronic form. The driving force for their implementation is cost savings. They alleviate the problem of redundancy and the related increase in expenses, as tests and procedures do not need to be repeated, since the information can be accessible to multiple healthcare providers. Compared to the traditional approach of storing the patients’ data, the benefits of EHRs are also easier transfer and analysis of health data on a large scale. Additionally, they allow for merging the data across different healthcare domains. This reform in health-related information management is therefore expected to ensure better care provisioning and reductions in healthcare costs. However, the EHR are also raising certain concerns of the patients. Due to the electronic nature and non-transparent handling of EHR records, the patients are increasingly worried about the privacy of their data. Consequentially, one of the main obstacles to EHR adoption are the privacy and security concerns of the users (Hiller, McMullen, Chumney, & Baumer, 2011).

In the current system design, the users are not in control over their medical records. In most systems, the retrieval of the electronic records from a central database does not need to be authorised by the user at the time of retrieval and for each medical person accessing it. Moreover, the access can also be carried out without the user’s knowledge. While the facilitation of the exchange of health information about a patient between various sources is considered to be a major benefit of the EHR systems, this inter-domain exchange of data is yet another reason why patients are distrustful about the offered privacy protection.

In order to address the aforementioned issues, this work provides a novel system model that grants the users augmented control over their data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that considers integration of EHRs into the eHealth assistance systems. The resulting system implements the preferences of users with regards to their data management, while ensuring appropriate care in emergency situations.