Health Record Index: Secure Access of Cloud-Stored Healthcare Data

Healthcare 4.0 demands healthcare data to be shaped into a common standardized and interoperable format for achieving more efficient data exchange. What is also needed is for this healthcare data to be both easily stored and securely accessed from anywhere, and vice versa. Currently, this is achieved through the secure storage of the healthcare data in different cloud repositories and infrastructures, which however increase the difficulty of accessing it in emergency situations from healthcare practitioners, or even from the citizens' themselves. The latter need to have specific credentials for accessing healthcare data in private cloud repositories, which can be almost impossible in urgent situations where this data must be accessed no matter what. For that reason, in this paper we are proposing a new health record indexing methodology that facilitates the access of non-privileged users (e.g. healthcare practitioners), to the healthcare data stored in cloud repositories of citizens-in-need, under the circumstances of emergency cases.