Flexible Access to Patient Data through e-Consent

The advances in healthcare and information technology are shifting more and more the ownership of data from medical institutions and doctors to individual citizens. However, since the medical information of an individual is confidential, the only basis for sharing it, is through prior informed consent which will regulate access to his private healthcare data. This paper highlights challenges investigated in three EU research projects and presents a solution utilizing novel access control mechanisms to ensure the selective exposure of the patients’ sensitive information thereby empowering them. Our solution can efficiently support the entire lifecycle of consent such as withdrawal, activation, deletion or update. Moreover it responds to complex and different scenarios in which the patient can define complicated and dynamic access control policies at different granularity levels. In this paper we propose a Personal Health Record (PHR) system, accessible through desktop and mobile devices, that explores the efficient access regulation to information according to the consent forms provided by the patients.