Abstract

Due to the cost pressure on the health care system an increase in the need for electronic healthcare records (EHR) could be observed in the last decade, because EHRs promise massive savings by digitizing and centrally providing medical data. As highly sensitive patient information is exchanged and stored within such systems, legitimate concerns about the privacy of the stored data occur, as confidential medical data is a promising goal for attackers. These concerns and the lack of existing approaches that provide a sufficient level of security raise the need for a system that guarantees data privacy and keeps the access to health data under strict control of the patient. This paper introduces the new architecture PIPE (Pseudonymization of Information for Privacy in e-Health) that integrates primary and secondary usage of health data. It provides an innovative concept for data sharing, authorization and data recovery that allows to restore the access to the health care records if the patients’ security token is lost or stolen. The concept can be used as basis for national EHR initiatives or as an extension to EHR applications.