In Europe, citizens are becoming increasingly mobile, while patients are gaining greater empowerment and awareness of their rights. Alongside these trends, there is a growing recognition of the need for better coordination among healthcare organizations across the continent.

SECANT (SECurity And privacy protectioN in Internet of Things devices), as an EU H2020 project, enhances digital security, privacy, and personal data protection within complex ICT infrastructures in healthcare sector. SECANT delivers a holistic framework for cybersecurity risk assessment, addresses both human and technical risk factors and bolsters the overall cybersecurity landscape. The third SECANT Use Case “Health data protection in healthcare supply chain” aims to validate the project objectives in giving a secure access to health information for different stakeholders after getting the patient’s consent while ensuring privacy, data protection and accountability in the access of operational data.​

SECANT Innovations

SECANT introduces a system for the secure data access within hospitals in the EU. This is aligned with EU goals for secure electronic health record (EHR) access, while also paving the road towards “a single market for electronic health record systems”, as envisioned by the European Health Data Space. More importantly, SECANT successfully conducted the first secure patient data access between Spain and Romania, proving the functionality of the integrated platform.

SECANT innovates within a pre-standardisation era of secure patient data access among EU countries, by utilizing the International Patient Summary (IPS). The IPS dataset comprises a minimal, non-exhaustive set of basic clinical data about a patient, which is specialty-agnostic, condition-independent, and readily usable by all clinicians for unscheduled (cross-border) patient care. This is a crucial innovation of the project, as SECANT is one of the first platforms capable of efficiently performing these tasks in real-world scenarios.

SECANT adopts interoperability standards to increase its opportunities for market entry. In terms of interoperability, SECANT uses HL7 FHIR, one of the most relevant set of standards in the field. HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically. Its implementation in SECANT ensures robust interoperability and seamless integration across diverse healthcare systems.

SECANT develops novel crypto-innovation methods. The ecosystem created by SECANT fosters innovation for new methods related to the protection of digital assets. Further, the project leverages state-of-the art crypto-technologies and opens new application domains for these methods.

These innovations provide added value as described below:

1. 1. • Patients have a complete ownership of their data
      • Patients and healthcare professionals enjoy data integrity
      • Stakeholders benefit from data confidentiality
      • Healthcare organisations gain competitive advantages by reducing their overhead.