Trust assessment of security for e-health systems

The expansive connectivity of emerging information systems has set the stage for pervasive access to healthcare services via e-health systems for selecting the best possible healthcare services. Emerging systems are expected to be highly dynamic open environments connecting diverse number of healthcare services and autonomous entities that are autonomous agents or software applications representing patients. Entities in such dynamic environments may have different security needs from e-health systems raising the challenge of trust computations regarding security. In this research, we proposed a trust assessment model of an e-health service from the viewpoint of an entity. The model contains a comprehensive architecture applicable to different types of entities, and a novel set of trust assessment metrics may be used to assess a specific property of a security system (i.e. partial metrics) or all properties (i.e. total metrics). The simulation based evaluation of proposed model in the context of a Hospital Online Appointment Service has shown that the proposed model provides better trust computation results than existing trust models for e-health systems. Furthermore, the entities are also able to assess the trust even with incomplete security information. (C) 2013 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.