A formal approach to build privacy-awareness into clinical workflows

Abstract

Clinical workflows consist of sets of tasks involving patients and healthcare professionals. In such an environment, maintaining the privacy of patient data is a significant challenge. Healthcare providers have to consider both legislative compliances with tightening privacy regulations and growing privacy concerns of individuals. Unlike data security, which aims at preventing unauthorized access, privacy focuses on providing individuals the ability to control when, how, and to what extent their data is used with a particular purpose. In this paper, we present our first steps on transforming existing non-privacy-aware clinical workflows into privacy-aware ones through algorithms based on privacy policies and privacy preferences.