Securely Streaming SVG Web-Based Electronic Healthcare Records involving Android Mobile Clients

Abstract

Although Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) technology largely facilitates patient care by providing clinicians with the ability to review a more complete medical record, interoperability and privacy issues present significant barriers to their implementation. This article proposes the open source SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) standard for representing electronic healthcare records for interoperability purpose where security can be enforced using lightweight SAX streaming filters. The SVG filters are based on the Java SAX API to push pieces of the SVG to the encryption/decryption handlers.  The SAX handlers can filter, skip tags, or encrypt tags partially or universally at any time from the stream of the SVG EHRs.  A prototype for implementing the SAX streaming filter is presented along with experiments to test its applicability in a web environment for sharing SVG EHRs on the Android mobile development environment.