Healthcare SaaS Based on a Data Model with Built-In Security and Privacy

Abstract

Cloud computing is a major technology enabler for providing efficient services at affordable costs by reducing the costs of traditional software and hardware licensing models. As it continues to evolve, it is widely being adopted by healthcare organisations. But hosting healthcare solutions on cloud is challenging in terms of security and privacy of health data. To address these challenges and to provide security and privacy to health data on the cloud, the authors present a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application with a data model with built-in security and privacy. This data model enhances security and privacy of the data by attaching security levels in the data itself expressed in the form of XML instead of relying entirely on application level access controls. They also present the performance evaluation of their application using this data model with different scaling indicators. To further investigate the adoption of IT and cloud computing in Indian healthcare industry they have done a survey of some major hospitals in India.