Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems

ended

In order to achieve high quality healthcare provision, it is increasingly important to collect highly confidential and personal medical data that has been obtained from a variety of sources, including personal medical medical devices and to share this through a variety of means, including public networks and other systems whose security cannot be implicitly trusted. Patients rightly expect full privacy, except where permission has been explicitly given, but they equally expect to be provided with the best possible medical treatment. Evidence suggests that integrating home-based healthcare into a holistic treatment plan is more cost effective, reduces travel-associated risks and costs, and increases the quality of health-care provision, by allowing the incorporation of more frequent home-, work- and environment-based monitoring and testing into medical diagnostics. There is a strong and urgent demand to deliver better, more efficient and more effective healthcare solutions that can achieve excellent patient-centric healthcare provision, while also complying with increasingly strict regulations on the use and sharing of patient data. This provision needs to be multi-site, crossing traditional physical and professional boundaries of hospitals, health centers, home and workplace, and even national borders. It needs to engage hospitals, medical practitioners, consultants and other specialists, as well as incorporating patient-provided data that is produced by personal monitoring devices, health-care apps, environmental monitoring etc. This creates huge pressures The goal of the SERUMS project is to put patients at the center of future health-care provision, enhancing their personal care, and maximizing the quality of treatment that they can receive, while ensuring trust in the security and privacy of their confidential medical data.