A Novel Privacy by Design Developed Framework for Electronic Health Records Management

Abstract

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 were 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 did not extensively use Privacy by
Design (PbD), distributed data storage and sharing when designing their
frameworks, which is the emphasis of this study. To design a framework on
privacy by design in electronic health records that can preserve the privacy of
patients during data collection, storage, access and sharing, we have analysed
fundamental principles of privacy by design, privacy design strategies, and
compatibility of our proposed healthcare principles with Privacy Impact
Assessment (PIA), Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR).

To demonstrate the comprehensive framework, we have implemented Patient
Record Management System (PRMS) to create interfaces for patients and
healthcare providers. And to provide transparency and security for sharing
patients’ medical files with various healthcare providers, we have implemented
a distributed file system and blockchain networks using the InterPlanetary File
System (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain. The developed framework is tested
and evaluated to ensure user performance, effectiveness, and security. The
complete solution is expected to provide progressive resistance in the aspect of
continuous data breaches in the patient information domain.

Date of Award	2023
Original language	English
Supervisor	Sami Azam (Supervisor), Bharanidharan Shanmugam (Supervisor) & Charles Yeo (Supervisor)