Governance of Cross-Organizational Healthcare Document Exchange through Watermarking Services and Alerts

Abstract

There is an increasing demand for sharing documents for process integration among organizations. Web services technology has recently been widely proposed and gradually adopted as a platform for supporting such an integration. There are no holistic solutions thus far that are able to tackle the various protection issues, specifically regarding the security and privacy protection requirements in cross-organizational progress integration. This paper proposes the exchange of documents through a Document / Image Exchange Platform (DIEP), replacing traditional ad-hoc and manual exchange practices. The authors show how the contemporary technologies of Web services under a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), together with watermarking, can help protect document exchanges with layered implementation architecture. Furthermore, to facilitate governance and regulation compliance against protection policy violation attempts, the management and the affected parties are notified with alerts for warning and possible handling. The authors discuss the applicability of the proposed platform with a physician towards security and privacy protection requirements based on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States, which imposes national regulations to protect individuals’ healthcare information. The proposed approach aims at facilitating the whole governance process from technical to management level with a single unified platform.