Secured Electronic Health Record Management Protocol

Abstract

In our progressive era of technology, digitization is becoming the link between businesses, people, processes, and data. Internet & mobile devices have allowed us the access to almost anything we want to know at the tip of our fingers, connecting us to home, school, work, or local library etc. with just a few clicks. Digitization is evolving with time and profoundly widening access by lowering the impediment to discovering information which is geographically scattered. A correctly digitized collection expands access, protects the safety of the data and provides new options for research. Proper digitization and distribution is essential in the way data are accessed and protected because digitizing allows new infiltrations and discoveries by not just the select few with physical access to the physical data but by any viewer from far away. Appropriate digitization can both directly diminish degradation of the original physical collection, as well as offer the content of collection in the case of any physical loss. The important documents can be stored safely in the repository for the data, shared on cloud or local document management system, and recovered with a simple click. Digitization makes it easier to manage arrangements for all activities within an organization. Application of digitization integrated internally includes sectors such as Health care, Education etc. The users could use self-select options and self-enter data using web-based interfaces allowing them to be able to manage their own data through controlling the structure Since digitization is now a common practice for storing and retrieving data, Electronic Health Record (EHR) management is becoming very popular. EHR management will bring many benefits including easy to store, cost effective, shareable with health professionals to a remote location, etc. However, EHR stores very sensitive data and thus, a number of security properties including privacy, secrecy, integrity, authenticity of data and availability must be ensured during data transmission, storing and sharing with health professionals. In this study, we have studied symmetric key based technique in designing EHR management protocol. In light of the existing efforts, we have developed a simple protocol for secured EHR management. A simple symmetric key based EHR management protocol that we validated using AVISPA, an industry-strength security protocol validation tool. Even though our proposal is primarily based on symmetric key, it identifies the doctors using their attributes [1][2] AVISPA has confirmed our protocol free from known attacks and confirmed the desired security properties as well.