Collaborative eHealth Meets Security: Privacy-Enhancing Patient Profile Management.

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Computer Science
• Cybersecurity

Background:

• Collaborative healthcare enhances quality and reduces costs.
• Electronic Health Record (EHR) sharing is growing for remote monitoring and patient data management.
• Security and privacy challenges hinder widespread EHR sharing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a privacy-aware profile management approach for secure EHR sharing.
• To empower patients in managing their health data and controlling access.
• To address the need for a flexible, efficient, and standards-based solution for selective information disclosure.

Main Methods:

• Developed a privacy-aware profile management system.
• Utilized an adaptive Merkle Tree to represent user profiles.
• Formalized the mathematical model underlying the Merkle Tree implementation.
• Validated the solution's performance through simulation experiments.

Main Results:

• The proposed approach enables patients to consolidate healthcare provider information and user-generated claims into a single credential.
• The adaptive Merkle Tree structure provides an efficient method for managing and verifying user profiles.
• Empirical validation demonstrated the effectiveness and performance of the privacy-aware solution.

Conclusions:

• The privacy-aware profile management approach enhances patient control over their health data.
• The solution offers a secure and efficient method for selective information disclosure in collaborative healthcare.
• This work contributes to overcoming security and privacy challenges in EHR sharing.