Delegation in a Distributed Healthcare Context: A Survey of Current Approaches

The development of infrastructures to facilitate the sharing of data for healthcare delivery and research purposes is becoming increasingly widespread. In addition to the technical requirements pertaining to efficient and transparent sharing of data across organisational boundaries, there are requirements pertaining to ethical and legal issues. Functional and non-functional concerns need to be balanced: for resource sharing to be as transparent as possible, an entity should be allowed to delegate a subset of its rights to another so that the latter can perform actions on the former's behalf, yet such delegation needs to be performed in a fashion that complies with relevant legal and ethical restrictions. The contribution of this paper is twofold: to characterise the requirements for secure and flexible delegation within the emerging distributed liealthcare context; and to evaluate existing approaches with respect to these requirements. We also suggest how some of these limitations might be overcome.

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