Developing a Secure Distributed Electronic Health System Using Information Hiding Techniques

Abstract

In general, urban hospitals offer specialized healthcare services, while rural hospitals have limited services and normally offer only basic hospital facilities. Therefore, people in rural areas have to travel relatively long distances to urban hospitals for specialized healthcare services. Ever since healthcare information systems have been implemented, the importance of their security cannot be overemphasized, particularly in the brilliance of the fact that healthcare information systems are deemed to comprise extremely sensitive data. The idea of storing healthcare data in electronic form raises concerns about patient privacy and information security. A secure distributed system is design to mitigate any threats in a portion of the system that will endanger data confidentiality, integrity and availability. This enhancement on distributed systems enables isolation of elements so that an intrusion only offers physical access to a part of the system; averts computer break-in by malicious users, and possible attempts by registered users to exceed or abuse their privileges. This paper provides an insight on securing data in electronic health system using secure distributed computing through steganography and watermarking algorithms for information hiding. The successful design and development of the secure electronic health system will assist healthcare professionals to ensure trust and enhance work productivity for improved medical healthcare delivery in developing countries like Nigeria