Nt1330 Unit 3 Assignment 1

Words: 341
Pages: 2

PHR has enabled an easy and reliable way of sharing the confidential health record information through a secure model. This PHR model helps users to create, share, manage and control their health records from one central place using the internet facility. Hence storing, retrieving and sharing is made easy and convenient. The patient's have full control on their medical records and can decide on who can access their personal record. But it is not easy to decide on this factor since the PHR service works on a cloud system and the owner does not have complete control over the information since it is stored in external servers. There is always an issue of security and privacy issues involved in cloud sharing and could lead to privacy risks. Another issue to be considered is that when PHR record is shared to everyone, then the security risk can slow down the entire model. …show more content…
Hence to resolve these problems we need to have an efficient model that can work even on non-trusted third party servers. The concept of encryption can highly serve this purpose. The PHR file owner has the control to encrypt the confidential data using any of the encryption models before it is stored in the cloud server. Now the PHR file can be accessed only by the users who have the decryption key. In this case the owner can take rights of deciding who can have the authorization to access the PHR. But the major drawback with this approach is since it is patient-centric; the limitation is that the patient may not be available online all the time to provide access to the user. Hence a work around has to be proposed for the same. The most possible solution to the above problem is to employ a central authority to perform key management for all PHR owners but again this involves a lot of authentication and trust