Coordinating Policy for Federated Applications

At the start of its present term of office in 1997 the UK government published a planning document promising ubiquitous access to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) held within the National Health Service (NHS). If such access is to become a reality then it is essential to guarantee confidentiality, since otherwise the media and the privacy vigilantes will prevent deployment. Among the rights included in the Patients’ Charter is a promise that each individual may determine who may access their health records and in what circumstances, and that every access made shall be logged. In October 1999 the Cambridge Computer Laboratory’s Opera group joined a consortium within the Eastern Regional Health Authority to propose an experimental architecture that included access control. Policy governing access to a particular set of records is derived from many high-level sources, and must be updated when any of these sources change. We outline an architecture to achieve this, within the framework of access control policy for EHRs. The problems of coordinating policy arise in many applications that span management regimes, and the techniques outlined are more generally relevant. This is work in progress.