eHealth Data Security and Privacy

Abstract

Contemporary healthcare utilizes data stored as e-health data, personal health records (PHR), electronic health records (EHR), as well as data from wearables and sensors. These personal health (PH) data must be secure, private, and usable for analysis to improve patient treatments and overall healthcare quality. For practitioners, these data are essential; for governments, they support decision-making; and for society, they enable new medical discoveries. Given the sensitivity of PH data, ensuring data confidentiality is crucial. Data must be standardized, accurate, and timely to be reliable for medical use. Key challenges include security, privacy, consent management, and legal compliance. Different legal and technical measures can be used to address these challenges. In this study, we consider data security and privacy from the whole aspect of the healthcare data life cycle, as well as the most important laws that regulate healthcare data security and privacy, starting from the treats to the solutions published in the literature. Privacy-preserving techniques are continually advancing, with significant developments in trusted execution environments and cryptographic methods. Current best practices involve strict adherence to consent and privacy policies, ensuring that individuals' data is handled with the utmost care. NoPeek learning techniques allow for data analysis without sharing the actual data, thereby enhancing privacy. This approach should be combined with differential privacy, a technique that adds statistical noise to data to prevent the identification of individual data points. Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises advancements in healthcare but requires adherence to regulations. Disease prediction models using AI analyze vast datasets to predict health-related threats but must balance benefits with data protection and regulatory compliance. Collaborative approaches can integrate predictive analytics into personalized healthcare while maintaining trust and ethical standards.

Keywords: GDPR; HIPAA; eHealth data privacy and security; healthcare standards.