An Innovative Approach for the Protection of Healthcare Information Through the End-to-End Pseudo-Anonymization of End-Users.

Protection of data privacy and anonymity in the healthcare domain is of crucial importance and imposes many challenges since it regards a multi-fold and multidimensional process that needs to be safeguarded on multiple levels. Data protection has to be safeguarded at application and context layer, at session layer and at network layer. Taking into account the existing challenges, the scope of the current paper is to present the approach and conceptual architecture of SHIELD, an innovative methodological approach and network architecture-deployed within the framework of the FI-STAR project-targeting at the protection of healthcare information through the pseudo-anonymization of end-users. SHIELD aspires to provide value added services that could complement the service offering of the FI-STAR project in particular for the target sector of health care, and strengthen its technology basis.