Securing electronic medical records transmissions over unsecured communications: An overview for better medical governance

Abstract

Nowadays, health care is one of the most important subjects in life. In USA, 100 billion dollars will be spent in the next 10 years, according to experts. The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is usually a computerized legal medical record created in an organization that delivers care, such as a hospital and doctor's surgery. In the age of technology, one of the most important factors for EMR is that it secures the records for the patients, protects their rights and is responsible for the disclosure of their data. An overview of this study has presented the importance of the privacy of EMR and the patients’ rights. In addition, cryptography algorithms and security requirements have been discussed and the paper has also discussed different architecture, designs and systems that have been reported in the literature. In a nutshell, most of these systems are poor in terms of achieving the security requirements, while on the other side, most of the systems have not discussed the patient rights and how the system can detect the person who broadcast these records. Key words: Electronic medical record, information security, data privacy, rights of patient and cryptography algorithms.