The “digital era” in the healthcare domain has resulted in the introduction and massive use of tele-monitoring solutions, Electronic Health Records (EHR), genomic information and mHealth applications in combination with the nascent concept of “coordinated care”. This creates the need for increased security implementations, leading to improved user acceptance of such applications and thus to large-scale adoption of these technologies and to full exploitation of their advantages.
KONFIDO is an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project aiming to address these challenges, as it has been proposed under the topic “Increasing digital security of health related data on a systemic level”. The project aims to advance the state-of-the-art of eHealth technology in four key dimensions of digital security, namely: data preservation, data access and modification, data exchange, and interoperability and compliance. To address the challenges of secure storage and exchange of eHealth data, protection and control over personal data, and security of health-related data gathered by mobile devices, KONFIDO takes a holistic approach – i.e. one targeting all the architectural layers of an IT infrastructure, and specifically: storage, dissemination, processing, and presentation. KONFIDO builds its solution upon and extends the results of a best of breed selection of successful projects, e.g. epSOS, STORK, DECIPHER, EXPAND, and ANTILOPE. The KONFIDO technological framework relies on 6 technology pillars: 1) security extensions provided by main CPU vendors; 2) security solutions based on photonic technologies; 3) homomorphic encryption mechanisms; 4) customised STORK-compliant eID support; 5) customized extensions of selected SIEM solutions; and 6) disruptive logging and auditing mechanisms. The usability of the proposed solutions will be tested in a realistic setup, where data will be exchanged and services will interoperate cross-border.
KONFIDO started its activities on November 2016, and during its first year, it conducted a systematic gap analysis for interoperable eHealth solutions due to security aspects, in order to define comprehensive user requirements that drive its technical development. The project also seeks intense interaction with the wider healthcare community, in order to identify key barriers and facilitators for eHealth solutions acceptance by conducting a survey involving all possible relevant stakeholders.
The outcomes of the gap analysis and the survey will be discussed in two concertation Workshops that will be organized by KONFIDO, in which representatives of key stakeholders will be invited to participate. The meetings will result in a set of prioritized key factors for eHealth acceptance linked with digital security of health related data. The first meeting was held on March 2017, in Copenhagen, Denmark, while the second is being held during the eHealth Forum 2017 event on October 20, 2017, in Athens, Greece.