Meeting EHR security requirements: SeAAS approach.

In the last few years, Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems have received a great attention in the literature, as well as in the industry. They are expected to lead to health care savings, increase health care quality and reduce medical errors. This interest has been accompanied by the development of different standards and frameworks to meet EHR challenges. One of the most important initiatives that was developed to solve problems of EHR is IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise), which adapts the distributed approach to store and manage healthcare data. IHE aims at standardizing the way healthcare systems exchange information in distributed environments. For this purpose it defines several so called Integration Profiles that specify the interactions and the interfaces (Transactions) between various healthcare systems (Actors) or entities. Security was considered also in few profiles that tackled the main security requirements, mainly authentication and audit trails. The security profiles of IHE currently suffer two drawbacks. First, they apply end point security methodology, which has been proven recently to be insufficient and cumbersome in distributed and heterogeneous environment. Second, the current security profiles for more complex security requirements are oversimplified, vague and do not consider architectural design. This recently changed to some extend e.g., with the introduction of newly published white papers regarding privacy [5] and access control [9]. In order to solve the first problem we utilize results of previous studies conducted in the area of security-aware IHE-based systems and the state-of-the-art Security-as-a-Service approach as a convenient methodology to group domain-wide security needs and overcome the end point security shortcomings.