Analysis of Privacy and Security Challenges in e-Health Clouds

Electronic Health Records (EHR) techniques are being used at an increasingly faster rate to store the patient data making it easier to retrieve, share and utilize it efficiently. This data can be used for research purposes, clinical trials and for studying epidemiology to come up with strategies for epidemic control. With a huge global inflation, the increasing costs of healthcare and the shortage of medicine, it becomes convenient for the healthcare organizations to migrate from the traditional healthcare system to a more sophisticated, cost effective and efficient cloud-based e-Health model. To optimize the full potential of an ICT-based e-Health system, it is imperative for the existing healthcare systems to be implemented in a full-fledged cloud environment. However, with numerous benefits of technology, it might pose some privacy and security threats as well. Therefore, the security and access control of such information is of vital significance. Nonetheless, with the increasing interest of healthcare organizations to migrate from the conventional healthcare systems to the modern cloud-based e-Health systems, not much care is being taken to address security and privacy issues effectively towards the protection of sensitive data.