On Secure Data Management in Health-Care Environment

Health-care management systems are of great relevance because they provide an easy and quick management of all aspects regarding a patient, not necessarily medical. Furthermore, there are more and more cases of pathologies in which diagnosis and treatment can be only carried out by using medical imaging techniques. With an ever-increasing prevalence, medical images are directly acquired in or converted into digital form, for their storage as well as subsequent retrieval and processing. Similarly, text interpreting medical image with other associated patient information, are included into or acquired directly in digital form and stored. It is easy to note that greater is the amount of clinical data available to the specialists, acquired for example on previously treated cases, and better is the quality and the rapidity of diagnosis and treatment. It is therefore important, if not essential, to share easily and quickly data and clinical experiences. However, such sharing among different entities, whether public or private, is a non-trivial task, since such information are always subjected to restrictions related to privacy laws and to health insurance regulations. To the best of our knowledge, in literature there are no systems which allows the rapid and secure sharing of clinical experiences among different entities. We propose a fully distributed system which allows secure sharing of all information (both medical and not) necessary for patients management. With our system, each node belonging to it, can access quickly, easily and in a secure way to a considerable amount of data, thereby improving the speed and quality of clinical evaluation performed by the physician.