The SIREN project was established by the Health Telematics Programme of the European Commission is to assist health care provider groups using regional health care networks to establish necessary security services. The activity concerned primarily the regional health care network projects within the EU programme but also targeted other regional and national user groups operating or planning for health care networks. The project has collected experiences from major regional health care networks throughout Europe with regard to security problems. Using these experiences and security expertise, particularly from the TrustHealth project of the programme, SIREN is disseminating information on good examples of solutions to the user groups. In addition to this booklet, the SIREN project has conducted a series of workshops and conference presentations in different European countries.
SIREN also provided educational material to highlight the problems and point at state of the art solutions available through the world wide web server: www.ehto.be/projects/siren
The project will also provide directed implementation assistance to a few health telematics projects that are looking to put the security services developed within the TrustHealth project on trial.
The first chapter provides an introduction to the problem area of securing communication in large health telematics networks. Chapter 2 describes the challenges with regard to legal requirements on digital data, particularly with regard to issues of proving authenticity. Chapter 3 provides an overview of typical healthcare applications and highlights some of the different security requirements posed. The major part of this booklet provides reports from security analyses and selected solutions from a number of different environments, mainly taken from European projects with participants from many different countries.