An access control framework for secured sharing of electronic health records using hierarchy similarity analyser

Abstract

Sharing relevant and authorised health data referred as electronic health records (EHRs) among interoperable e-health environments requires identification and mitigation of security gaps accruing out of these collaborations. Ensuring confidentiality and availability of EHR during transit requires a standard access control framework that can efficiently and securely realise collaborations. Disparity in access policies often result in policy conflicts and rule redundancy. The framework must encompass heterogeneity of workflow and frequently changing demands of health professionals and resolves policy conflicts and reduces rule-redundancy. This paper proposes a framework and its verification for integrating access control policies based on similarities between user and resource hierarchies of healthcare units. The framework comprises of a hierarchical similarity analyser (HSA) that assign a security level to each attribute generated on the similarities obtained. The verification of the framework is performed through access control policy testing (ACPT) developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).