Security of electronic health records based on Web services

The current healthcare environment has embraced electronic health records (EHRs) as evidenced by the numerous standards both formal and proprietary that have arisen. However, the issues of security and privacy in this new landscape has not been adequately addressed. Legislation has attempted to ameliorate the situation by mandating a minimum level of protection for the healthcare consumer. However, the leading standards lack technical specificity that would ensure security and privacy in a modem distributed system of EHRs. The research presented in this paper presents a means to address some of these issues by using a service orientated architecture.