నైరూప్య

Cloud computing framework to securely share health & medical records among federations of healthcare information systems

Sudhir Shenai, M Aramudhan

In general, Healthcare information systems (HIS) majorly maintains three kinds of health & medical records such as personal Heath Record (PHR), Electronic Medical Record (EMR), and Electronic Health Record (EHR).Today’s health care providers normally host their HIS at their private data centers, or with cloud service providers. Normally, the records such as EMR and EHR are maintained by the Health care providers HIS. The PHR, which contains history of the health information about the individuals is normally maintained by the patients itself. Earlier, it was maintained manually by the individual. But, nowadays, we have host of cloud applications to maintain the PHR. Thus PHR hosted in these cloud applications can be accessed from anywhere in the world by authenticated persons and can be shared with desired health care providers. But the sharing of PHR demands many requirements such as sharing only desired part of the record instead of complete record, sharing with anonymous parties of no pre-existing relationship with assured privacy and integrity of the record. A complete healthcare solution also demands timely & selective sharing of relevant EMR & EHR among the federations of healthcare providers with the grant of patient’s permission. Thus sharing of various Health & Medical records among various stakeholders in a timely and selective manner is of utmost necessity for global quality healthcare treatment. In this paper, we proposed a federated cloud computing framework, which enables the sharing of Health & Medical records among the various stakeholders with ease of timely access, ensuring privacy & integrity of the records. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit.