Title: Design and application of a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant privacy framework for pervasive healthcare

Authors: Srilaxmi Malladi, Upkar Varshney

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, 34 Peachtree street, Suite 1450, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. ' J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Computer Information Systems, Georgia State University, 35 Broad Street, Atlanta, GA 30302, USA

Abstract: With an increasing emphasis on pervasive healthcare services, providing a high degree of privacy to patients is becoming a major challenge due to: (a) an increased number of avenues, such as device, access points, switches and database; (b) more threats to privacy then ever before and (c) a higher expectation from society due to the sensitive and personal nature of medical and health information. In this paper, we present a framework for privacy in pervasive healthcare. Various applications and scenarios have been identified, details of the framework are presented and its applications to representative pervasive healthcare applications.

Keywords: electronic health records; EHR; electronic medical records; Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; HIPAA; pervasive healthcare; privacy; security; wireless health; mobile communications; e-health; electronic healthcare.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2008.018056

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2008 Vol.6 No.4, pp.499 - 518

Published online: 28 Apr 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article