Security and trust in virtual healthcare communities

Abstract

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]:

A mashup based framework for multi level healthcare interoperability

“…In addition, we recognize that security and privacy requirements have to be considered when implementing our framework in clinical settings due to the fact that a secure infrastructure is important for the operation of any virtual healthcare community, and it is critical to protect the confidentiality of sensitive medical data (Chryssanthou et al 2009). …”

A risk management model for securing virtual healthcare communities

“…In such dynamic and data-rich environments, a holistic security approach (Wozak et al, 2007;Apostolakis et al, 2009;Chryssanthou et al, 2009) is needed in order to improve confidentiality and reliability and consequently increase community trust. In terms of a holistic solution, technological, organisational, human-related and other aspects must be examined in order to minimise the risk and potential damage for everyone (i.e.…”

“…We now describe the 'Plan' phase of the methodology, which leads to the design of the security-enabled architecture that we presented in Chryssanthou et al (2009) and that is depicted in Figure 3. The architecture is multi-layered and assumes that the sensitive community information is stored in the secured internal layer, which guarantees software updates, data backups, etc.…”

“…Along with this security model, the architecture of the community's ISMS is designed. Multitier architectures (Maji et al, 2008;Chryssanthou et al, 2009) can solve authentication and security issues of the medical community and strengthen the protection of medical data against improper use, unauthorised access or accidental loss.…”

“…The proposed model justifies a security-enabled architecture and follows a scenariobased validation process, which explains by means of hypothetical incident scenarios the controls selected in the security model proposed by Chryssanthou et al (2009). All the scenarios are based on reported security violation incidents, which target the community assets and lead to loss of confidentiality, availability, integrity, etc.…”