Serums

Serums: Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems.

The Serums Project is an EU Horizon 2020 research project which deals with security and privacy of future-generation healthcare systems, putting patients at the centre of future healthcare provision, enhancing their personal care and maximising the quality of treatment they receive.

In order to achieve high quality healthcare provision, it is increasingly important to collect highly confidential and personal medical data from a variety of sources, including personal medical devices and to share this through a variety of means, including public networks and other systems whose security cannot be implicitly trusted. Patients rightly expect full privacy, except where permission has been explicitly given, but they equally expect to be provided with the best possible medical treatment. Integrating home-based healthcare into a holistic treatment plan is cost effective, reduces travel-associated risks and costs, and increases the quality of healthcare provision, by allowing the incorporation of more frequent home-, work- and environment- based monitoring and testing into medical diagnostics. There is thus a strong and urgent demand to deliver better, more efficient and more effective multi-site and sometimes even multi-national healthcare solutions that can achieve excellent patient-centric healthcare provision, while also complying with increasingly strict regulations on the use and sharing of patient data.

Contact: Prof Juliana Bowles, Dr Chris Brown.