Conference article

End-to-end Security and Privacy Protection for Co-operative Access to Health and Care Data in a Telehealth Trial System for Remote Supervision of COPD-Patients

Martin Gerdes
Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Agder, Norway

Rune Fensli
Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Agder, Norway

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Published in: SHI 2015, Proceedings from The 13th Scandinavien Conference on Health Informatics, June 15-17, 2015, Tromsø, Norway

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 115:5, p. 25-32

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Published: 2015-06-26

ISBN: 978-91-7685-985-8

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

The security and privacy of personal, health-related data in emerging telehealth and telecare systems is crucial, in particular under consideration of additional requirements. On the one hand optimal usability of the devices and applications provided for the monitoring of the health condition is desirable for the supervised patient. On the other side the different health and care organizations require co-operative access to the common infrastructure for storage, transmission and provision of the data from the patients. In this paper we analyse the different types of security related issues and requirements of the telehealth trial system developed for a Norwegian implementation of the EU funded United4Health project, and describe a solution concept for functionalities and policies addressing those requirements. Identified design limitations of the security concept and initial results from the trial operation are discussed. The paper concludes with the general relevance of the proposed security concept also for telehealth systems for remote monitoring of other patient groups by potentially other types of services, and an outlook on expected infrastructure evolutions and corresponding security considerations.

Keywords

Security; privacy; telehealth; telecare; EHR; NHN; cloud; health information technology

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