Accessing electronic health records in critical incidents using context-aware attribute-based access control

Abstract

In emergency situations, different actors involved in first aid services should be authorized to retrieve information from the patient’s Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The research objectives of this work involve the development and implementation of methods to characterise emergency situations requiring extraordinary access to healthcare data. The aim is to implement such methods based on contextual information pertaining to specific patients and emergency situations and also leveraging personalisation aspects which enable the efficient access control on sensitive data during emergencies. The Attribute Based Access Control paradigm is used in order to grant access to EHRs based on contextual information. We introduce an ABAC approach using personalized context handlers, in which raw contextual information can be uplifted in order to recognize critical situations and grant access to healthcare data. Results indicate that context-aware ABAC is a very effective method for detecting critical situations that require emergency access to personal health records. In comparison to RBAC implementations of emergency access control to EHRs, the proposed ABAC implementation leverages contextual information pertaining to the specific patient and emergency situations. Contextual information increases the capability of ABAC to recognize critical situations and grant access to healthcare data.