Privacy-Preserving Recommendation Systems for Consumer Healthcare Services

Advances in e-health bring new challenges with regard to the protection of sensitive patient data; an increasing number of applications require to share data with consumer healthcare services. Typically the providers of those services reside outside the traditional health care domain, where medical data protection laws (such as HIPAA) do not apply. Instead, technical means of protection should safeguard critical health data that is shared with third parties. In this paper, we show that cryptographic privacy-enhancing protocols are a key tool to protect the privacy of patients in upcoming consumer e-health services. In particular we focus on services offering health advice, allowing to locate specialists and supporting the formation of patient communities.