A Comprehensive Consent Management System for Electronic Health Records in the Healthcare Ecosystem

Abstract

The recent trends in the healthcare sector have catalyzed the emergence of several healthcare ecosystems. The inevitable and innate health data exchange amongst ecosystem components for provisioning of healthcare services as well as secondary use has raised several trust issues. The consent is a predominant mechanism to ensure privacy preserving, secure and ethical exchange, as well as sharing of health records of a patient by establishments. The proposed consent management system supports the life cycle of consent given by the patient or their authorized entity as well as validation and delegation of consent by a provider for health records requested by a user in an ecosystem. It reinforces different types as well as flavors of consent to strike a balance between privacy protection, ease of use, and patient safety. It supports the simple, flexible, and efficient management of consent at different granularity of health resource, user, and purpose. This is enabled by embedding consent structure in tree representation of EHR and a tree traversal algorithm for conflict resolution.