MicroShare: Privacy-Preserved Medical Resource Sharing through MicroService Architecture

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Health Informatics
• Software Engineering

Background:

• Legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems pose challenges for secure medical data sharing and resource utilization.
• Existing methods for patient privacy often rely on data de-identification, which can be complex and may not fully protect sensitive information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and validate a MicroService architecture for medical resource sharing that preserves patient privacy without de-identification.
• To enhance the efficiency of clinical data queries for both internal and external users.

Main Methods:

• Refactoring legacy EHR systems into autonomous MicroServices using technologies like Java EE and RESTful web services.
• Implementing secure data exchange via JSON Web Tokens, enabling data in unidentifiable XML and JSON formats.
• Enforcing a strict need-to-know principle for data access and inhibiting retrospective data processing attacks.

Main Results:

• The implemented toolkit successfully facilitates secure medical data exchange while maintaining patient privacy.
• The approach avoids the need for data de-identification, simplifying the process and potentially improving data utility.
• Validation on an endoscopic reporting application demonstrated the system's effectiveness and adherence to openEHR and MST standards.

Conclusions:

• The proposed MicroService architecture offers a novel and effective solution for secure medical resource sharing.
• This method enhances data accessibility for researchers and organizations while upholding stringent patient privacy standards.
• The approach contributes to improved healthcare quality monitoring and treatment by enabling secure data utilization.