Efficient Medical Information Retrieval in Encrypted Electronic Health Records

Abstract

The recent development of eHealth platforms across the world, whose main objective is to centralize patient's healthcare information to ensure the best continuity of care, requires the development of advanced tools and techniques for supporting health professionals in retrieving relevant information in this vast quantity of data. However, for preserving patient's privacy, some countries decided to de-identify and encrypt data contained in the shared Electronic Health Records, which reinforces the complexity of proposing efficient medical information retrieval approach. In this paper, we describe an original approach exploiting standards metadata as well as knowledge organizing systems to overcome the barriers of data encryption for improving the results of medical information retrieval in centralized and encrypted Electronic Health Records. This is done through the exploitation of semantic properties provided by knowledge organizing systems, which enable query expansion. Furthermore, we provide an overview of the approach together with illustrating examples and a discussion on the advantages and limitations of the provided framework.