Skip to main content

HEalth: Privately Computing on Shared Healthcare Data

  • 1038 Accesses

Abstract

We give an overview of how to use threshold Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to enable data sharing in a medical context. Hospitals in the US are not currently equipped or motivated to share data privately. Threshold encryption would allow hospitals to share sensitive data securely. The combined encrypted data from all the hospitals can be used to compute statistics and even carry out machine learning at a large scale. We propose the use case of assessing ‘fairness’ in the context of hospital admissions. We analyse how fairness can be computed from the data, and describe how this could be beneficial to patients as well as regulators.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Asharov G, Jain A, López-Alt A, Tromer E, Vaikuntanathan V, Wichs D (2012) Multiparty computation with low communication, computation and interaction via threshold FHE. In: Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Springer, pp 483–501

    Google Scholar 

  2. Association AH ((accessed January 14, 2020)) Fast Facts on U.S. Hospitals, 2020. https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals

  3. Boneh D, Gennaro R, Goldfeder S, Jain A, Kim S, Rasmussen PM, Sahai A (2018) Threshold cryptosystems from threshold fully homomorphic encryption. In: Annual International Cryptology Conference, Springer, pp 565–596

    Google Scholar 

  4. Brakerski Z, Gentry C, Vaikuntanathan V (2014) (leveled) fully homomorphic encryption without bootstrapping. ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (TOCT) 6(3):13

    Google Scholar 

  5. for Disease Control C, Prevention (2017 (accessed January 14, 2020)) Health Expenditures. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/health-expenditures.htm

  6. for Economic Co-operation O, Development (2020 (accessed January 14, 2020)) Health expenditure and financing. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA

  7. Fan J, Vercauteren F (2012) Somewhat practical fully homomorphic encryption. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2012:144

    Google Scholar 

  8. Graham S, Estrin D, Horvitz E, Kohane I, Mynatt E, Sim I (2011) Information technology research challenges for healthcare: From discovery to delivery. ACM SIGHIT Record 1(1):4–9

    Google Scholar 

  9. Jain A, Rasmussen PM, Sahai A (2017) Threshold fully homomorphic encryption. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2017:257

    Google Scholar 

  10. Schoenmakers B (2011) Threshold Homomorphic Cryptosystems, Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 1293–1294. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_13

  11. Walby S, Armstrong J (2011) Developing key indicators of ‘fairness’: Competing frameworks, multiple strands and ten domains – an array of statistics. Social Policy and Society 10(2):205–218, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746410000552

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Erin Hales .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

de Castro, L., Hales, E., Xu, M. (2021). HEalth: Privately Computing on Shared Healthcare Data. In: Lauter, K., Dai, W., Laine, K. (eds) Protecting Privacy through Homomorphic Encryption. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77287-1_12

Download citation