PatientService: electronic patient record redaction and delivery in pervasive environments

E-healthcare today is moving away from the tethered domain and becoming diffused into an environment rich with portable digital devices. In this evolving environment, the need to deliver information such as electronic patient records at the point-of-care is a prime factor in managing the healthcare system efficiently. This however presents serious security challenges in pervasive environments such as wirelessly-connected hospitals; where protecting the confidentiality of the information, while at the same time allowing authorized user to access it conveniently is the core issue in the paradigm. We describe the security challenges in pervasive computing environments, and explain why traditional security mechanisms fail to meet the demands of these environments. We use an architecture that incorporates policy based security and distributed trust management to provide a highly flexible approach for accessing electronic patient records that are electronically reacted depending on the users digital credentials. We then present a prototype of the system using a variety of portable devices with wireless technology and include the policy used to test the system.