Information Security Threats in Patient-Centred Healthcare

Abstract

Healthcare is taking an evolutionary approach towards the adoption of Patient-Centred (PC) delivery approach, which requires the flow of information between different healthcare providers to support a patient's treatment plan, so the Care Team (CT) can seamlessly and securely access relevant information held in the different discrete Legacy Information Systems (LIS). Each of these LIS deploys an organisational-driven information security policy that meets its local information sharing context needs. Nevertheless, incorporating these LIS in collaborative PC care brings multiple inconsistent policies together, which raises a number of information security threats that can block the CT access to critical information across a patient's treatment journey. Using an empirical study, this chapter identifies information security threats that can cause the issue, and defines a common collaboration-driven information security design. Finally, it identifies requirements in LIS to address the inconsistent policies in modern PC collaborative environments that would help improve the quality of care.

HealthyBroker: A Trustworthy Blockchain-Based Multi-Cloud Broker for Patient-Centered eHealth Services

“…Electronic health care (eHealth) is a modern health care delivery model defined by WHO (World Health Organization) [1] as "the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for health." The model is deployed to help implement the holistic patient-centered care (also called "shared care") that comprises the core of modern health care services [2,3]. Patient-centered care puts patients at the heart of health care services provided based on shared, informed decision-making [3].…”

“…The model is deployed to help implement the holistic patient-centered care (also called "shared care") that comprises the core of modern health care services [2,3]. Patient-centered care puts patients at the heart of health care services provided based on shared, informed decision-making [3]. Services may include diagnostic, primary, preventative, rehabilitative, emergency, long-term, hospital, palliative, and home care.…”

“…This care requires, however, relevant medical information and data to flow seamlessly among and across health care settings. One obstacle to this is that discrete legacy heterogeneous information systems are not designed to share information across hospitals [3].…”

“…Cloud computing also enables easy information sharing and collaboration among care teams from multiple service providers [4,5]. Although the benefits have motivated health care providers to use multi-cloud eHealth services to allow for informed decisions [4,5], this raises information security, privacy, and trust concerns [4,5] related to complying with health-data-protection regulations [3]. In this environment, delivering eHealth services across multiple cloud providers demands a reliable, trust-aware, cloud-based brokering architecture that complies with applicable data-protection laws and ensures that patient information is complete, authentic, and unsullied.…”

“…In this environment, delivering eHealth services across multiple cloud providers demands a reliable, trust-aware, cloud-based brokering architecture that complies with applicable data-protection laws and ensures that patient information is complete, authentic, and unsullied. Not having an architecture with this level of security can deprive health providers of consortium and, more importantly, create life-threatening situations for patients should treatment decisions be based on invalid information [1,3].…”