On the Facilitation of Fine-Grained Access to Distributed Healthcare Data

As an increasing amount of healthcare-related data is captured in both clinical and research contexts, the drive to provide appropriate access to such data becomes stronger. The very nature of such data means that simplistic approaches to authorisation--be they coarse-grained or role-based--are insufficient: the needs of the domain give rise to requirements for authorisation models capable of capturing fine-grained, expressive access control policies. We describe the development of a framework for the secure sharing and aggregation of healthcare-related data, called sif(for service-oriented interoperability framework). In particular, we concentrate on the access control aspects of the system and describe its utilisation of XACML in this respect.