A Study of Access Control for Electronic Health Records
The expansion between Information Technology and Healthcare has created many new options for both disciplines, as well as challenges. One of these topics is the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and the push for a universal record. A challenge for this topic is access control: how to keep patient’s personal health information secure, but at the same time accessible to all fields of healthcare and accomplish this within the federal privacy laws made by our government. This study focuses on the idea of a single EHR containing all the different medical information for all the areas of healthcare for a patient. This single EHR would be stored in a database and its use secured though the use of access control using a hierarchy of user groups, which would be divided into different roles to assign access privileges. This access control method would be implemented by possibly using mechanisms such as Bell-LaPadulla Model, The Strawman Design, Public/Private Key algorithms, or other methods. The first goal would be to create this structure for a single entity (e.g., One Hospital, Clinic, or Doctor’s office) and then progress to a distributed model where multiple entities can store and share information.
Electronic Medical Record, EMR, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Health Information Technology
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