Access Management in the Personal Health Record: An Architectural View

Abstract

This thesis focuses on how access management in the Personal Health Record (PHR) plays its part in the interoperability and information exchange of the future environment of patient-centered care.Personal health records and state of the art access management mechanisms are introduced and a categorization of existing PHR solutions from different viewpoints is performed. Architectural differences are then discussed in detail. Furthermore, this thesis analyzes different approaches as to how an access management scheme using the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) can be implemented for interoperable PHRs. Using concrete usage scenarios, it evaluates this approach in different architecture environments. Finally, a case study concerning pregnancy care presents a suggestion to how this access management scheme can be implemented in the Norwegian health care environment, interoperable with systems already present.Through the conceptual architecture analysis and the case study, this thesis has shown that utilizing the flexibility of XACML, several architectures and development environments may adopt this scheme independent of the impact of future health care networks.