A Semantic Approach to Secure Electronic Patient Information Exchange in Distributed Environments

Modern medical information systems collect large amounts of diverse patient data in order to facilitate a higher level patient care. Although desirable, this functionality has a tremendous potential for abuse, where patient information can be shared, disclosed and used for other (secondary) purposes. In most cases, patient consent is solicited and institutional policies are put in place to limit the privacy and security risks. However, in practice these measures have proven to be inadequate, resulting in violation of patient consent even for non-life threatening scenarios. We propose a framework to capture privacy & security policies and to protect exchange of sensitive medical patient information. Our framework is comprised of distributed multiagent environments re ecting healthcare institutions and personnel. We utilize semantic techniques for data representation and reasoning. Furthermore, we do not require pre-established trust relationships to be present for exchanging private sensitive information between multiple parties. In our proposed framework, all decisions to share information, are backed up by semantic proof of authorization that can be veri ed by an independent third party.