Secure Architecture for EMR

Abstract

With the advent of virtualization, high speed availability of internet and distributed computing techniques make computing resources cheaper, more dominant and more available than ever. Most of the world business shift from traditional IT systems to new computing model in recent years and this new computing model is called cloud computing. The new model offers new features to healthcare domain to enhance their functionality. So this domain is shifting rapidly from traditional computing to cloud computing. In healthcare domain different stakeholders like physicians, insurance companies, patients, healthcare providers need to work together. For information processing/sharing among different stakeholders cloud computing is best option in terms of cost, time, throughput and service uptime. Shifting from traditional EMR system to cloud implies that there are several threats in terms of security and privacy. This is main barrier because of which healthcare industry feel hesitation to transform its services on cloud. In our research we propose a secure architecture for the EMR. Authentication service implemented using extended FIPS 196 authentication protocol. i.e before exchanging sensitive information on cloud between client and server, must exchange random numbers and generate/verify digital signatures. Once authenticated a user, then at every call checked that user has required permissions to access a resource on EMR or not. For this purpose specific policy decision point implemented that decides access or rejection for that particular resource on EMR.