Protecting Patient Privacy when Sharing Medical Data

This paper describes a national eHealth platform concept with a multi-level privacy protection in order to improve the security and privacy of medical information on their storage locations as well as during the exchanging/sharing processes. The key idea is to classify and split-up data into different servers. A Trusted Third Party server manages personal identifying data together with the related pseudonyms while the medical information server manages the related medical data assigned to pseudonyms. The well known IHE-XDS profiles are enriched by Public Key Infrastructure, symmetric and asymmetric encryption together with pseudonymization methods. IHE-XDS promote the interoperability level and the extensions increase the security level. Keywords— eHealth; Patient Privacy; Electronic Health Records; Secure Patient Data Storage