Cloud Assisted mobile access health data with privacy and auditability - 12/12/2016 07:30 EST

Fast access to health data enables better healthcare service provisioning, improves quality of life, and helps saving life by assisting timely treatment in medical emergencies. Anywhere-anytime-accessible electronic healthcare systems play a vital role in our daily life. Services supported by mobile devices, such as home care and remote monitoring, enable patients to retain their living style and cause minimal interruption to their daily activities. In addition, it significantly reduces the hospital occupancy, allowing patients with higher need of in-hospital treatment to be admitted. While these e-healthcare systems are increasingly popular, a large amount of personal data for medical purpose are involved, and people start to realize that they would completely lose control over their personal information once it enters the cyberspace. According to the government website, around 8 million patients’ health information was leaked in the past two years. There are good reasons for keeping medical data private and limiting the access. An employer may decide not to hire someone with certain diseases. An insurance company may refuse to provide life insurance knowing the disease history of a patient. Despite the paramount importance, privacy issues are not addressed adequately at the technical level and efforts to keep health data secure have often fallen short. This is because protecting privacy in the cyberspace is significantly more challenging. Thus, there is an urgent need for the development of viable protocols, architectures, and systems assuring privacy and security to safeguard sensitive and personal digital information. Outsourcing data storage and computational tasks becomes a popular trend as we enter the cloud computing era. A wildly successful story is that the company’s total claims capture and control (TC3) which provides claim management solutions for healthcare payers such as Medicare payers, insurance companies, municipalities and self-insured employer health plans. TC3 has been using Amazon’s EC2 cloud to process the data their clients send in (tens of millions of claims daily) which contain sensitive health information. Outsourcing the computation to the cloud saves TC3 from buying and maintaining servers, and allows TC3 to take advantage of Amazon’s expertise to process and analyze data faster and more efficiently. The proposed cloud-assisted mobile health networking is inspired by the power, flexibility, convenience, and cost efficiency of the cloud-based data/computation outsourcing paradigm. We introduce the private cloud which can be considered as a service offered to mobile users. The proposed solutions are built on the service model. A software as a service (SaaS) provider provides private cloud services by using the infrastructure of the public cloud providers (e.g., Amazon, Google). Mobile users outsource data processing tasks to the private cloud which stores the processed results on the public cloud. The cloud-assisted service model supports the implementation of practical privacy mechanisms since intensive computation and storage can be shifted to the cloud, leaving mobile users with lightweight tasks.