Towards Secure and Privacy Preserving Data Processing in E-Health

E-health guarantees the continuity of medical care and facilitates communication between the patient and healthcare organizations. For this reason, medical data must be accessible at all times and exchanged between stakeholders. Given the highly sensitive nature of this data and the increasing frequency of data breaches, it is crucial to implement strict privacy and security measures. Since patient is considered the owner of his medical data under laws as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act HIPAA and the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, he/she must have the right to privacy and to make decisions about sharing sensitive data. On the other hand, the stakeholders with whom the patient will share its information are not similar; each one requires specific data for different purposes. That's why the data transfer should not be performed in the same manner. In this article, we propose a framework to ensure the security and privacy of data processing in E-health systems. This framework is based on smart contracts to manage patient consent and traceability of data transfer, as well as mechanisms to classify data and apply the most suitable data masking technique to protect efficiently sensitive information.