Security and trust in virtual healthcare communities

The main purpose of a virtual healthcare community is to enforce members ’ collaboration and allow them collectively conduct health care activities. Patient monitoring and medical consultation and support are the most popular activities inside health care communities. They bring together medical experts and patients and require confidentiality, reliability and trust in order to be successful. An examination of existing virtual communities for healthcare leads to the conclusion that many of them fail to meet requirements for building trust. Several ethical, legal and technical issues must be considered in order to build a trustful community. This work presents the architecture of a virtual healthcare community portal with emphasis on the issues that help building trust inside the community. With a set of hypothetical usage scenarios that challenge trust in the community we uncover healthcare community’s pitfalls and illustrate the solutions provided by the proposed architecture. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.6.5 [Management of computing and information systems]: Security and Protection – authentication, insurance, unauthorized acces