Social Credential-Based Role Recommendation and Patient Privacy Control in Medical Emergency

Abstract

Emerging Health Information Technologies (HIT), such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Personal Health Records (PHR) systems, facilitate access to and sharing of patients’ medical data in a distributed environment. The privacy protection of medical information is a pressing issue with the use of these medical technologies. In this paper, the authors present a Patient-controlled Privacy Protection Framework, which allows a patient to specify his or her own privacy policies on their own medical data no matter where they are stored. In addition, the authors extend this basic framework to medical emergency situations, where roles and users may not be limited to an organizational boundary. To enforce patient’s privacy policies even in emergency situations, the authors propose the Situation Role-based Privacy Control model and a social network-based user credential discovery method to recommend a situation role to candidate users. The authors present a mobile prototype system and two experiments to show the feasibility of our approach.