Challenges in eHealth: From Enabling to Enforcing Privacy

Privacy is recognised as a fundamental requirement for eHealth systems. Proposals to achieve privacy have been put forth in literature, most of which approach patient privacy as either an access control or an authentication problem. In this paper, we investigate privacy in eHealth as a communication problem, since future eHealth systems will be highly distributed and require interoperability of many sub-systems. In addition, we research privacy needs for others than patients. In our study, we identify two key privacy challenges in eHealth: enforced privacy and privacy in the presence of others. We believe that these privacy challenges are vital for secure eHealth systems, and more research is needed to understand these challenges. We propose to use formal techniques to understand and define these new privacy notions in a precise and unambiguous manner, and to build an efficient verification framework.