Modeling Privacy Aware Health Information Exchange Systems

Abstract

Healthcare delivery requires the coordination of activities across many different service providers and organizations and generally requires the secure exchange of health information across organizations. Privacy and care management policies at the federal, state, and institutional level lead to a confusing array of potentially contradictory or subjective policy interpretations. Enforcement of these policies is equally problematic. In this paper we present a novel approach that may simplify policy creation, interpretation, and implementation in health information systems. Our approach uses the tools of Model Integrated Computing and Logic Programming to alliteratively reduce the gap between functional system requirements and the privacy policies that are mandated by the Government and the Institution. This approach will provide both insight and explanatory power that may lead to simpler and more consistent policies across jurisdictions. The automatic generation of executable code from the system suggests a scalable approach to policy enforcement.