Preserving Patient Privacy During Computation over Shared Electronic Health Record Data

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Cryptography
• Data Security

Background:

• Patient Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold crucial data for medical research and public health.
• Privacy regulations and data sharing risks restrict access to sensitive EHR data.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an end-to-end security solution for sharing EHR data.
• To address patient privacy concerns and risks associated with resource sharing.
• To facilitate secure EHR data sharing over unsecured third-party servers.

Main Methods:

• Implementation of a leveled homomorphic encryption (LHE) scheme.
• Development of a secure data sharing protocol.
• Time testing of query aggregation and linear computations.

Main Results:

• The proposed solution enables secure sharing of EHR data.
• Leveled homomorphic encryption effectively addresses privacy and security concerns.
• Performance testing was conducted on a high-performance server.

Conclusions:

• The developed security solution facilitates secure and private EHR data sharing for research.
• LHE is a viable cryptographic tool for protecting sensitive health information.
• The system supports essential data aggregation and computation tasks securely.