Security in healthcare informatics: Design and implementation of a robust authentication and a hybrid access control mechanism

Ensuring adequate security and privacy of health information is a moral and legal mandate of the twenty-first-century healthcare industry that is fast moving towards complete digitalization. As a consequence of increased threats to security of electronic health records, a genuine need for a robust and effective authentication and access control schemes has emerged. Since healthcare systems pose some unique security constraints, especially in case of access control, none of the extant off-the-shelf solutions is directly applicable. In this paper - recognizing the fact that authentication is an indispensable precursor to access control - we address both issues together by proposing a robust authentication scheme and a hybrid access control model for healthcare informatics. We explain the design and implementation of the proposed system, and discuss evaluation results that were found to successfully satisfy various security requirements of the healthcare domain.