Safeguarding Electronic Health Records: A Review of Privacy and Security in EHR Workflows

Abstract

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have revolutionized the healthcare industry by improving the accessibility to patient data, optimizing workflows and refining clinical decision making. The increasing use of digital records raises serious privacy and security concerns, particularly about healthcare data storage and management, access and retrieval, and sharing and interoperability. This survey paper comprehensively reviews existing privacy-preserving and security-enhancing approaches across the key stages of the EHR workflow. This review explored several cryptographic methods, access control models, blockchain-based designs, and interoperability standards that aim to protect patient data while ensuring the seamless exchange of EHR data. Furthermore, we examine the limitations of the current approaches, encompassing scaling issues, computation overhead, and regulatory compliance challenges. Finally, the paper pinpoints the recent accomplishments and emerging trends to identify potential future directions for improving privacy and security in EHR systems, encompassing AI-driven threat detection, Zero-Trust architectures and decentralized identity management. This review is a significant resource for researchers, regulatory bodies and healthcare professionals aiming to create more secure and privacy oriented EHR solutions.