Farida Habib Semantha

The privacy and security of patients’ health records have been an ongoing issue, and researchers are in a race against technology to design a system that can help stop the compromising of patient data. Many researchers have proposed solutions; however, most solutions have not incorporated potential parameters that can ensure private and secure personal health records management, which is the focus of this study. To design and develop a solution, this research thoroughly investigated existing solutions and identified potential key contexts. These include IOTA Tangle, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), IPFS protocols, Application Programming Interface (API), Proxy Re-encryption (PRE), and access control, which are analysed and integrated to secure patient medical records, and Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices, to develop a patient-based access management system that gives patients full control of their health records. This research developed four prototype applications to demonstrate the proposed solution: the web appointment application, the patient application, the doctor application, and the remote medical IoT device application. The results indicate that the proposed framework can improve healthcare services by providing immutable, secure, scalable, trusted, self-managed, and traceable patient health records while giving patients full control of their own medical records.

Privacy in Electronic Health Records (EHR) has become a significant concern in today’s rapidly changing world, particularly for personal and sensitive user data. The sheer volume and sensitive nature of patient records require healthcare providers to exercise an intense quantity of caution during EHR implementation. In recent years, various healthcare providers have been hit by ransomware and distributed denial of service attacks, halting many emergency services during COVID-19. Personal data breaches are becoming more common day by day, and privacy concerns are often raised when sharing data across a network, mainly due to transparency and security issues. To tackle this problem, various researchers have proposed privacy-preserving solutions for EHR. However, most solutions do not extensively use Privacy by Design (PbD) mechanisms, distributed data storage and sharing when designing their frameworks, which is the emphasis of this study. To design a framework for Privacy by Design in Electronic Health Records (PbDinEHR) that can preserve the privacy of patients during data collection, storage, access and sharing, we have analysed the fundamental principles of privacy by design and privacy design strategies, and the compatibility of our proposed healthcare principles with Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To demonstrate the proposed framework, ‘PbDinEHR’, we have implemented a Patient Record Management System (PRMS) to create interfaces for patients and healthcare providers. In addition, to provide transparency and security for sharing patients’ medical files with various healthcare providers, we have implemented a distributed file system and two permission blockchain networks using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain. This allows us to expand the proposed privacy by design mechanisms in the future to enable healthcare providers, patients, imaging labs and others to share patient-centric data in a transparent manner. The developed framework has been tested and evaluated to ensure user performance, effectiveness, and security. The complete solution is expected to provide progressive resistance in the face of continuous data breaches in the patient information domain.

Privacy has become an increasingly significant apprehension in today’s rapidly changing economy primarily for personal and sensitive user data. The levels of personal data violation are increasing day by day however privacy-preserving frameworks are available. This paper conducted an in-depth analysis of contemporary frameworks to identify the key mechanisms to produce a sophisticated data privacy framework to reduce the rate of data breach particularly for the Patient Record Management System (PRMS). There are several studies available that stated healthcare data privacy, still, complete data protection solution with the application of privacy by design towards patients’ health data by ensuring privacy in each layer of the PRMS are quite limited, which is the focus of this study. PRMS manages personal and sensitive data while delivering healthcare services to the patients and as such, have also the potential to carry significant risks to the privacy of their data. A novel conceptual framework with three distinct and sequential phases is suggested in this research, each of which is defined in a distinct section. The first phase is defined as the planning to identify the key limitations of contemporary frameworks so these can be minimized to ensure privacy in each layer of data processing. The second phase incorporates the key components of data privacy to satisfy the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed framework. Finally, the third phase is the implementation of the selected requirements of the assessment phase to prevent privacy incursion events in PRMS. The complete framework is anticipated to deliver a sophisticated resistance in contradiction to the continuous data breaches in the patients’ information domain.

In this digital age, we are observing an exponential proliferation of sophisticated hardware- and software-based solutions that are able to interact with the users at almost every sensitive aspect of our lives, collecting and analysing a range of data about us. These data, or the derived information out of it, are often too personal to fall into unwanted hands, and thus users are almost always wary of the privacy of such private data that are being continuously collected through these digital mediums. To further complicate the issue, the infringement cases of such databanks are on a sharp rise. Several frameworks have been devised in various parts of the globe to safeguard the issue of data privacy; in parallel, constant research is also being conducted on closing the loopholes within these frameworks. This study aimed to analyse the contemporary privacy by design frameworks to identify the key limitations. Seven contemporary privacy by design frameworks were examined in-depth in this research that was based on a systematic literature review. The result, targeted at the healthcare sector, is expected to produce a high degree of fortification against data breaches in the personal information domain.