Security issues for data sharing and service interoperability in eHealth systems: the Nu.Sa. test bed

TL;DR

The paper presents the Nu.Sa. framework for secure, privacy-preserving data sharing and interoperability in Italian eHealth systems, demonstrating its feasibility and scalability through real-world testing.

Contribution

It introduces a security-focused solution for data sharing in eHealth, with tools for authorization and encryption, and discusses its implementation and scalability.

Findings

Successful implementation in Italy with thousands of test cases

Good feasibility demonstrated for secure data sharing

Scalable architecture suitable for cloud deployment

Abstract

The aim of the Nu.Sa. project is the definition of national level data standards to collect data coming from General Practitioners' Electronic Health Records and to allow secure data sharing between them. This paper introduces the Nu.Sa. framework and is mainly focused on security issues. A solution for secure data sharing and service interoperability is presented and implemented in the actual system used around Italy. The solution is strongly focused on privacy and correct data sharing with a complete set of tools devoted to authorization, encryption and decryption in a data sharing environment and a distributed architecture. The implemented system with more than one year of experiences in thousands of test cases shows a good feasibility of the approach and a future scalability in a cloud based architecture.