User-centric private matching for eHealth networks - A social perspective

The widely deployed electronic health (eHealth) systems changed people's daily life due to the extraordinary benefits, such as more efficiency, higher accuracy and broader availability. Patients in the eHealth network use their personal health records (PHRs) to communicate with their physicians and obtain medical services. As a matter of fact, patients who share the same diseases or symptoms want to communicate with each other not only for treatment, but also for psychological therapy. However, without sufficient knowledge of the authenticity of other patients' PHRs, patients are reluctant to share their medical information. On the other hand, patients would accept the patient-to-patient interaction only if their privacy issues of PHR are also well preserved. In this paper, we design a privacy-preserving user-centric private matching scheme from a social perspective in eHealth networks, where patients use verified PHR to find other patients who share the same situations and derive different user-centric results based on each one's own policy. In our scheme, the matching process guarantees both the verifiability and the privacy of patients' PHRs. Based on security and efficiency analysis, we show that our work satisfies both the privacy preservation and practicality requirements. © 2012 IEEE.