Biblio

In smart cities, data privacy and security issues of Electronic Health Record(EHR) are grabbing importance day by day as cyber attackers have identified the weaknesses of EHR platforms. Besides, health insurance companies interacting with the EHRs play a vital role in covering the whole or a part of the financial risks of a patient. Insurance companies have specific policies for which patients have to pay them. Sometimes the insurance policies can be altered by fraudulent entities. Another problem that patients face in smart cities is when they interact with a health organization, insurance company, or others, they have to prove their identity to each of the organizations/companies separately. Health organizations or insurance companies have to ensure they know with whom they are interacting. To build a platform where a patient's personal information and insurance policy are handled securely, we introduce an application of blockchain to solve the above-mentioned issues. In this paper, we present a solution for the healthcare system that will provide patient privacy and transparency towards the insurance policies incorporating blockchain. Privacy of the patient information will be provided using cryptographic tools.

With the exponential growth in the usage of electronic medical records (EMR), the amount of data generated by the healthcare industry has too increased exponentially. These large amounts of data, known as “Big Data” is mostly unstructured. Special big data analytics methods are required to process the information and retrieve information which is meaningful. As patient information in hospitals and other healthcare facilities become increasingly electronic, Big Data technologies are needed now more than ever to manage and understand this data. In addition, this information tends to be quite sensitive and needs a highly secure environment. However, current security algorithms are hard to be implemented because it would take a huge amount of time and resources. Security protocols in Big data are also not adequate in protecting sensitive information in the healthcare. As a result, the healthcare data is both heterogeneous and insecure. As a solution we propose the Secure Pattern-Based Data Sensitivity Framework (PBDSF), that uses machine learning mechanisms to identify the common set of attributes of patient data, data frequency, various patterns of codes used to identify specific conditions to secure sensitive information. The framework uses Hadoop and is built on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as a basis for our clusters of machines to process Big Data, and perform tasks such as identifying sensitive information in a huge amount of data and encrypting data that are identified to be sensitive.

Geocoding, the process of translating addresses to geographic coordinates, is a relatively straight-forward and well-studied process, but limitations due to privacy concerns may restrict usage of geographic data. The impact of these limitations are further compounded by the scale of the data, and in turn, also limits viable geocoding strategies. For example, healthcare data is protected by patient privacy laws in addition to possible institutional regulations that restrict external transmission and sharing of data. This results in the implementation of “in-house” geocoding solutions where data is processed behind an organization's firewall; quality assurance for these implementations is problematic because sensitive data cannot be used to externally validate results. In this paper, we present our software framework called bench4gis which benchmarks privacy-aware geocoding solutions by leveraging open big data as surrogate data for quality assurance; the scale of open big data sets for address data can ensure that results are geographically meaningful for the locale of the implementing institution.

Differential privacy is an approach that preserves patient privacy while permitting researchers access to medical data. This paper presents mechanisms proposed to satisfy differential privacy while answering a given workload of range queries. Representing input data as a vector of counts, these methods partition the vector according to relationships between the data and the ranges of the given queries. After partitioning the vector into buckets, the counts of each bucket are estimated privately and split among the bucket's positions to answer the given query set. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using different workloads over several attributes. The results show that partitioning the vector based on the data can produce more accurate answers, while partitioning the vector based on the given workload improves privacy. This paper's two main contributions are: (1) improving earlier work on partitioning mechanisms by building a greedy algorithm to partition the counts' vector efficiently, and (2) its adaptive algorithm considers the sensitivity of the given queries before providing results.