Scalable and Secure Sharing of Personal Health Records in Cloud Computing using Attribute-Based Encryption

Personal Health Records (PHRs) should remain the lifelong property of patients, who should be able to show them conveniently and securely to selected caregivers and institutions. In this paper, we present My PHR Machines, a cloud-based PHR system taking a radically new architectural solution to health record portability. In My PHR Machines, health-related data and the application software to view and/or analyze it are separately deployed in the PHR system. After uploading their medical data to My PHR Machines, patients can access them again from remote virtual machines that contain the right software to visualize and analyze them without any need for conversion. Patients can share their remote virtual machine session with selected caregivers, who will need only a Web browser to access the pre-loaded fragments of their lifelong PHR. We discuss a prototype of My PHR Machines applied to two use cases, i.e., radiology image sharing and personalized medicine.