Exploiting Multimodal Biometrics in E-Privacy Scheme for Electronic Health Records

Abstract

Existing approaches to protect the privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHR) are either insufficient for existing medical laws or they are too restrictive in their usage. For example, smartcard-based encryption systems require the patient to be always present to authorize access to medical records. A major issue in EHR is how patient’s privacy and confidentiality can be maintained because there are known scenarios where patients’ health data have been abused and misused by those seeking to gain selfish interest from it. Another issue in EHR is how to provide adequate treatment and have access to the necessary information especially in pre-hospital care settings. Questionnaires were administered by 50 medical practitioners to identify and categorize different EHR attributes. The system was implemented using multimodal biometrics (fingerprint and iris) of patients to access patient record in pre-hospital care. The software development tools employed were JAVA and MySQL database. The system provides applicable security when patients’ records are shared either with other practitioners, employers, organizations or research institutes. The result of the system evaluation shows that the average response time of 6seconds and 11.1 seconds for fingerprint and iris respectively after ten different simulations. The system protects privacy and confidentiality by limiting the amount of data exposed to users. The system also enables emergency medical technicians to gain easy and reliable access to necessary attributes of patients’ EHR while still maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of the data using the patient’s fingerprint and iris.

Keywords: Electronic Health Record, Privacy, Biometrics