Authentication mechanism of Electronic Health Record (EHR) in the cloud

Electronic health record (EHR) is a system that contains patients' complete medical related records from birth to death. These records consist of diagnoses, medications, laboratory tests, and results. The records are created by the patients and accessed by health providers such as doctors, nurses, pharmacies, etc. The advantages of using cloud computing has helped the health organizations to dispense the local servers and shift all their data to the cloud, which helped them save space, energy, and cost, as well as provide the benefit of accessing the data by patients and healthcare providers from anywhere at any time. Exchanging medical records in the cloud, however, has threatened the security and privacy of e-health systems where the authentication, access control, and integrity of the medical records are the main challenges in e-health clouds. In this thesis, we study the authentication mechanism of an EHR system and investigate an improved version using attribute based encryption ABE. Patients have full control over their medical records which are stored in a semi trusted servers. The system also works on access policies in case of emergency.