Securing telehealth applications in a Web-based e-health portal

Telehealth applications can deliver medical services to patients at remote locations using telecommunications technologies, such as the Internet. At the same time, such applications also pose unique security challenges. First, the trust issue becomes more severe due to the lack of visual proofs in telehealth applications. The public key infrastructure (PKI) is insufficient for providing the same kind of trust a patient may attain during a face-to-face service. Second, telehealth services, such as tele-monitoring or tele-consultant, naturally demand a systematic organization of users, roles, resources, and flows of information. Existing access control mechanisms in an e-health system are usually incapable of dealing with such workflow-based services. This paper provides cost-efficient solutions to those issues in the context of a Web-based e-health portal system. First, we propose a PKI-like infrastructure for establishing trust between users using biometrics-based authentication and hierarchies of trust. Second, we develop an access control method for workflow-based telehealth services using a rule-based module already available in the portal system