The Network Security Regime for the Hybrid Connection of Healthcare Entities

The rapid development of the blooming city requires to expand the government healthcare services for the public because of increasing inhabitants. Additional temporary government healthcare service is set up within a university having an operating hospital in order to solve the urgent requests of the mass amount of the inhabitant. This has resulting resources (medical equipment and IT services) sharing by these healthcare entities but independent operations should be maintained. In order to keep the privacy and security of the digital data and patient data, this paper proposes a method of creating a new subnet as common network area for sharing the resources, while maintaining their independencies at the same time. We have added the network security appliances (firewalls) connecting to the healthcare entities. Through the features of network address translation (NAT), network policy and access control list, this common subnet with hybrid connection (university hospital network and the government hospital network) can accessed by these entities via the specified IP addresses. As a result, the existing IP addresses for each healthcare entity network can be retained, and providing the secured method to grant the access right to the common area to share the digitalized medical resources. In order to protect the security of the cooperated hospital's internal networks, unauthorized traffic into and out of the subnet is blocked or restricted by firewalls as per policies configured.