Technical Aspects of Data Protection in Health Care Informatics *

Data protection comprises availability and data integrity as well as data confidentiality and privacy. We first consider security problems and their causes, and then measures against them. Finally, we recommend actions which should be taken independently of the construction of specific systems. Our main subject is distributed systems and medical networks: At present, most applications of informatics (computer science) in health care are stand-alone ones, such as databases or 3-D imaging systems. In the future, however, there will be more and more distributed systems. For example, for administrative purposes, lots of PCs in a hospital could be interconnected by a local area network, or PCs at private doctors could communicate with computers at insurances via a public network. For direct medical purposes, there are proposals to use video conferences to consult external experts during operations, or to monitor patients in their homes. The use of chipcards as carriers of emergency data is a distributed system, too. For security, distributed systems bring about new dangers, but also new possibilities for security measures. Dangers mainly result from the fact that the new systems are more complex, there are more interdependences, and more people have access to at least some part of the system than before. Possibilities are offered, e.g., because more complicated security measures can be performed by computers, and data can be put out of reach of someone or some fault by suitable physical distribution.