Developing Patient Controlled Access: An Access Control Model for Personal Health Records

Abstract

The health and social care sector has a continuous growth in the use of information technology. With more and more information about the patient stored in different systems by different health care actors, information sharing is a key to better treatment. The introduction of the personal health record aims at making this treatment process easier. In addition to being able to share information to others, the patients can also take a more active part in their treatment by communicating with participants through the system. As the personal health record is owned and controlled by the patient with assistance from health care actors, one of the keys to success lies in how the patient can control the access to the record. In this master's thesis we have developed an access control model for the personal health record in a Norwegian setting. The development is based on different studies of existing similar solutions and literature. Some of the topics we present are re-introduced from an earlier project. Interviews with potential users have also been a valuable and important source for ideas and inspiration, especially due to the fact that the access control model sets high demands on user-friendliness. As part of the access control model we have also suggested a set of key roles for the personal health record. Through a conceptual implementation we have further shown that the access control model can be implemented. Three different solutions that show the conceptual implementation in the Indivo personal health record have been suggested, using the Extensible Access Control Markup Language as the foundation.