In emergency care, fast and efficient treatment is vital. The availability of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) allows healthcare professionals to access a patient’s data promptly, which facilitates the decision-making process and saves time by not repeating medical procedures. Unfortunately, the complete EMR of a patient is often not available during an emergency situation to all treatment teams. Cloud services emerge as a promising solution to this problem by allowing ubiquitous access to information. However, EMR storage and sharing through clouds raise several concerns about security and privacy. To this end, we propose a protocol through which all treatment teams involved in the emergency care can securely decrypt relevant data from the patient’s EMR and add new information about the patient’s status. Furthermore, our protocol ensures that treatment teams will only access the patient’s EMR for the period during which the patient is under their care. Finally, we present a formal security analysis of our protocol and some initial experimental results.

Availability of medical records during an emergency situation is of paramount importance since it allows healthcare professionals to access patient's data on time and properly plan the next steps that need to be taken. Cloud storage has the potential to provide a solution to the problem of data unavailability during an emergency situation. However, sharing medical records raises several concerns about security and privacy. In this paper, we study the problem of how to share encrypted patients' data during an emergency situation. To this end, we propose a protocol through which a team of healthcare professionals can securely decrypt the medical records of a patient who is under an emergency situation (e.g. acute stroke). Furthermore, our protocol ensures that a team of healthcare professionals will only have access to the patient's data for the time needed to complete a specific process related to the patient's situation (e.g. transfer patient to the hospital). In our study, the dynamically granting and revoking data access during an emergency treatment is the main novelty.