Ethical considerations in deploying post-quantum cryptography in healthcare

While it is essential for healthcare to migrate to post quantum to safeguard sensitive medical data that has a long lifespan, the deployment presents challenges in terms of computational power, interoperability, accessibility, and responsible data protection.This study puts forth a framework for the evaluation of secure and responsible migration from a health care perspective which is called Ethical Post-Quantum Cryptography Healthcare Framework (E-PQC-HCF).The methodology combines the ML-KEM-768, ML-DSA-65, AES-256-GCM and AHP-TOPSIS methods for evaluating the security, performance, privacy, interoperability, and ethics.During a controlled prototype evaluation, E-PQC-HCF had a satisfaction rate for policy compliance of 96.2% and a success rate for interoperability of 93.8% with an ECC-based baseline authentication latency that has been increased by 12.6%.The hybrid configuration proposed in this paper is 9.3% more suitable than the deployment of standalone PQC as suggested by AHP-TOPSIS.The novelty here is using measurable ethical criteria, in conjunction with PQC selection.The findings show that, with a good PQC migration strategy, the protection of healthcare data over the long term can be improved and not affect the operational overhead and compatibility.