An Ontological Model for Privacy in Emerging Decentralized Healthcare Systems

Emerging healthcare systems are expected to leverage new Internet of Things (IoT) trends to enable preventive and personalized medicine. However, the success of such systems is entirely dependent on the ability to preserve patient privacy. This paper proposes a decentralized ontology based system architecture that caters to a healthcare organization's privacy needs as well as its enterprise security policy concerns considering futuristic IoT and Electronic Health Records (EHR) trends in healthcare. To identify privacy infringements and organizational policy violations across the institution, our proposed HealthCare Security and Privacy (HCSP) ontology is utilized in conjunction with three agent-level filters: the Exception Creation Agent (ECA), the Policy Mapping Agent (PMA), and the Privacy Assurance Filter (PAF). Preliminary evaluation has shown effectiveness of the HCSP ontology in terms of detection of policy compliance to HIPAA standards.