European Patient Summary Guideline: Focus on Greece.

The European Patient Summary (PS) guideline specifies a minimal dataset of essential and important information for unplanned or emergency care initially defined in the epSOS project with aim to improve patients' safety and quality of Care. The eHealth Network of European Union (EU) Member State (MS) representatives established under Article 14 of the EU directive 2011/24 on patient rights to cross-border healthcare adopted PS guideline in November 2013 and since then the guideline has been part of MS strategic eHealth implementation plans, standardization efforts, and concrete regional, national, European and international projects. This paper reviews implementation efforts for the implementation of an operational patient summary service in Greece drawing on challenges and lessons learned for sustainable standards-based large scale eHealth deployment in Europe and abroad, as well as the reuse of best practices from international standards and integration profiles.

Watermarking SDK implementation to facilitate integration in a secure healthcare environment.

The implementation of digital watermarking technology in healthcare applications is still in its infancy; however, the benefits of exploring this technology towards secure and efficient health data management are steadily propagated and realized by the research community. The paper presents the architecture of a watermarking software development kit (SDK), which provides multiple watermarking functionality and can be customized according to the targeted medical application, in order to address security of sensitive data, origin and data authentication, image archiving and retrieval. Two use cases of the proposed watermarking SDK are presented, the one involving access to the watermarking engine through a user interface, and the other referring to the case that the engine is embedded into the image acquisition device. The nature of the embeddable information that is applicable in each use case is also described.

Digital watermarking in telemedicine applications--towards enhanced data security and accessibility.

Implementing telemedical solutions has become a trend amongst the various research teams at an international level. Yet, contemporary information access and distribution technologies raise critical issues that urgently need to be addressed, especially those related to security. The paper suggests the use of watermarking in telemedical applications in order to enhance security of the transmitted sensitive medical data, familiarizes the users with a telemedical system and a watermarking module that have already been developed, and proposes an architecture that will enable the integration of the two systems, taking into account a variety of use cases and application scenarios.