Coco-Cloud project: Confidential and compliant clouds

Abstract

The Coco-Cloud (Confidential and Compliant Cloud) project is under the scope of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission and its main objective is to allow users to share data in the Cloud, guaranteeing its privacy and security in the case of sensitive information, ensuring that the current legislation in the involved countries is enforced. In this context, information regarding patients' health is one of the most important examples of sensitive data. During the diagnostic imaging routine and the subsequent processing, several documents with sensitive information related to the patient are generated. These data are only available either within our healthcare centers' intranet or in some storage device that the patient keeps. The Coco Cloud e-health pilot is driven by our private hospital network in which a Cloud-based radiological patient portal will be developed. Its aim is to allow patient access to their radiological information in a delocalized manner, providing medical images and personalized reports. This system will eliminate patient's need to return to his reference hospital to physically collect the results of imaging acquisitions and/or post-processing, facilitating access to relevant content for any medical specialist authorized by the patient, as well as share images and reports with other users and physicians of different specialties involved in the patient's healthcare. This goal is achieved through a cloud-based system which introduces important advantages such as the flexibility to allocate or remove resources, the data security and the document control mechanism, or the capability to work from anywhere, are just a few reasons which allow cloud-based systems increase the efficiency and decrease the costs of the daily work.