Design of a web based secured E-health system

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.