Community cloud architecture to improve use accessibility with security compliance in health big data applications

Abstract

The adoption of big data analytics in healthcare applications is overwhelming not only because of the huge volume of data being analyzed, but also because of the heterogeneity and sensitivity of the data. Effective and efficient analysis and visualization of secure patient health records are needed to e.g., find new trends in disease management, determining risk factors for diseases, and personalized medicine. In this paper, we propose a novel community cloud architecture to help clinicians and researchers to have easy/increased accessibility to data sets from multiple sources, while also ensuring security compliance of data providers is not compromised. Our cloud-based system design configuration with cloudlet principles ensures application performance has high-speed processing, and data analytics is sufficiently scalable while adhering to security standards (e.g., HIPAA, NIST). Through a case study, we show how our community cloud architecture can be implemented along with best practices in an ophthalmology case study which includes health big data (i.e., Health Facts database, I2B2, Millennium) hosted in a campus cloud infrastructure featuring virtual desktop thin-clients and relevant Data Classification Levels in storage.