Facilitating Health Information Exchange in Medical Emergencies

Nowadays an increasing attention is paid towards the goal of Health Information Exchange (HIE), especially when it comes to the exchange of health data among different healthcare institutions. A very important aspect though still remains the ability to exchange this data with the citizens as well, in a way that gives the control over their data. To this end, this paper proposes two secure HIE protocols, to facilitate on (i) the secure backup of health data to trusted storage cloud providers, and (ii) on the exchange of health data between individual citizens and trusted healthcare professionals during emergency situations. An evaluation scenario is being followed along with these protocols, resulting in their overall efficiency and applicability, with limitations including the continuous changes of interoperability and security requirements, which are equally addressed in this manuscript.