Biometric access control for e-health records in pre-hospital care
José R. Díaz-Palacios, Víctor J. Romo-Aledo, Amir H. Chinaei · 2013
Efficient and privacy-preserved access to the health record of patients is necessary to correctly practice medicine. This research addresses two concerns in emerging health software systems. First, electronic health records are not yet remotely accessible without using a token (e.g. health card). Second, patients' privacy must be preserved even in special situations such as emergency cases. This paper proposes to exploit biometric identification to access a central health record database featured by privacy policies. The experiments implement a real world scenario in which an ambulance reaches an unconscious patient who needs pre-hospital medical care for which their health record is retrieved from the database and is modified to meet privacy policies. The results demonstrate an average response time of 19.8 seconds when over 200K patients are registered in the database.