Privacy Protection of Electronic Healthcare Records in e-Healthcare Systems

The use of information and communications technology (ICT) in health care has led to significant improvements in care quality and costs reduction. This chapter discusses and proposes solutions for privacy protection of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) in e-Healthcare Systems in the era of nano-based technologies. It reviews the mechanisms and tools for achieving EHR privacy showing their strengths and weaknesses. Privacy of patients and other users of e-Healthcare Systems are recognized as a fundamental requirement, but also one of the formidable challenges affecting the trust and acceptability of these systems. There are many proposals that have been put forward in the literature, most of which approach patient privacy as either an access control or an authentication problem. The chapter argues that the future of the cloud requires fundamental changes in the way large-scale distributed systems are designed to account for data confidentiality and privacy.