A Secure Framework for Sharing Electronic Health Records over Clouds

Healthcare providers widely use Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems due to their benefits. Shareability of EHRs among different healthcare providers has become a point of interest, and Cloud Computing offers the best platform for such a sharing service due to its scalability and availability. Cloud Computing can offer an on-demand reliable service for healthcare providers to retrieve EHRs from remote providers regardless of geographic location, time difference or working hours. However, privacy and security of stored medical data in Cloud Computing environments pose serious problems. Over the past few years, research has been done to develop access control mechanisms and security techniques for such sharing systems. In this paper, previous related work is reviewed with a focus on the security challenges associated with sharing EHRs. A framework is proposed which allows secure sharing of EHRs over the Cloud among different healthcare providers. The framework ensures the confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, availability and auditability of EHRs.