A conceptual framework of personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) system to enhance security and privacy

In recent years, the electronic health record (eHR) system is regarded as one of the biggest developments in healthcare domains. A personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) system, offered by the Australian government makes the health system more agile, reliable, and sustainable. Although the existing PCEHR system is proposed to be fully controlled by the patients, however there are ways for healthcare professionals and database/system operators to reveal the records for corruption as system operators are assumed to be trusted by default. Moreover, as a consequence of increased threats to security of electronic health records, an actual need for a strong and effective authentication and access control methods has raised. Furthermore, due to the sensitive nature of eHRs, the most important challenges towards fine-grained, cryptographically implemented access control schemes which guarantee data privacy and reliability, verifying that only authorized people can access the corresponding health records. Moreover, an uninterrupted application of the security principle of electronic data files necessitates encrypted databases. In this paper we concentrates the above limitations together by proposing a robust authentication scheme and a hybrid access control model to enhance the security and privacy of eHRs. Homomorphic encryption technique is applied in storing and working with the eHRs in the proposed cloud-based PCEHR framework. The proposed model ensures the control of both security and privacy of eHRs accumulated in the cloud database.