Abstract:
Health care system is one of the vital sectors in each country for its national interest. Today
health care organizations heavily depend on paper based medical records. Paper is easily
misplaced, lost, intercepted and read by unauthorized parties. Patients or health organization
cannot properly take care the paper based medical records. However for proper treatment, the
doctor must need to know the previous medical history of a patient. Adoption of Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) with the health care system is a demand of this day for
increasing the efficiency of medical information management. To enable the patient, nurse,
doctor and administrator for efficient access of relevant information to enhance the quality of
patient care and to reduce health care errors is a challenge. Since e-Health services are usually
cloud enabled where ubiquitous access to healthcare data are considered essential for effective
treatment. Electronic records of the patients frequently need to be exchanged among different
health care institutions. So the system is exposed to all kinds of security threats. Again electronic
records are more vulnerable than paper based documents. It has introduced various securities and
privacy concerns. So there are scopes of research for developing secured e-Health system. This
paper presents a model of secured e-health system which enables all medical entities like
patients, doctors, nurses, medical technologist, pharmacist, healthcare organizations, pathology
labs, pharmacies etc. to interact with each other within a common framework. The system also
introduces e-Health Card (Smart Card) for each patient for authentication and better health
service. The work incorporates two important aspects of the proposed e-Health system: (i) the
development and deployment of a web based medical information management system where
patient’s authentication is performed by smart card and (ii) the privacy and security concern of
the proposed system which is implemented by Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to access
patient’s medical record and by Encryption Algorithm to Exchange of medical documents. This
proposed system will provide an easy to carry and access facilities everywhere in the country.
Here the e-Health Card will play the vital role for identifying the patient in hospitals or
diagnostic centers, saving his medical record and protecting his privacy.
