Achieving IT Security in a Telematic Rescue Assistance System

Many of the main causes of death such as heart attack and stroke usually strike outside of hospitals. Therefore patient outcome depends to a large extent on the quality of preclinical care. In order to improve it, Telematic Rescue Assistance Systems (TRAS) are being developed. They transmit vital signs, audio and sometimes video data from the rescue team to an emergency physician at a remote site, thus enabling this specialist to assist in diagnosis and treatment. Not only is specialist expertise brought to the emergency site, but also time to definite treatment is reduced, as specialists are involved earlier and hospitals can be informed in advance about incoming patients. The proper functioning of such systems depends on the correct handling of highly sensitive patient data. While there are numerous methodologies for achieving IT security for large organizations, none exists for small distributed medical systems such as TRAS. After comparing several methodologies, the IT baseline protection methodology [Sec08b] was chosen for its ability to prescribe specific IT security measures and applied to a TRAS currently in development in Aachen.