The main purpose of a virtual healthcare community is to enforce members' collaboration and allow them collectively conduct health care activities. Patient monitoring and medical consultation and support are the most popular activities inside health care communities. They bring together medical experts and patients and require confidentiality, reliability and trust in order to be successful. An examination of existing virtual communities for healthcare leads to the conclusion that many of them fail to meet requirements for building trust. Several ethical, legal and technical issues must be considered in order to build a trustful community. This work presents the architecture of a virtual healthcare community portal with emphasis on the issues that help building trust inside the community. With a set of hypothetical usage scenarios that challenge trust in the community we uncover healthcare community's pitfalls and illustrate the solutions provided by the proposed architecture. Categories and Subject DescriptorsK.6.5 [Management of computing and information systems]:

Virtual healthcare communities aim to bring together healthcare professionals and patients, improve the quality of healthcare services and assist healthcare professionals and researchers in their everyday activities. In a secure and reliable environment, patients share their medical data with doctors, expect confidentiality and demand reliable medical consultation. Apart from a concrete policy framework, several ethical, legal and technical issues must be considered in order to build a trustful community. This research emphasises on security issues, which can arise inside a virtual healthcare community and relate to the communication and storage of data. It capitalises on a standardised risk management methodology and a prototype architecture for healthcare community portals and justifies a security model that allows the identification, estimation and evaluation of potential security risks for the community. A hypothetical virtual healthcare community is employed in order to portray security risks and the solutions that the security model provides.

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