Dynamic security for medical record sharing

Information routinely collected by health care organizations is used by researchers to analyze the causes of illness and evaluate the effectiveness of potential cures. Medical information sharing systems are built to encourage hospitals to contribute patient data for use in clinical studies. These organizations possess a wide variety of environments and risk assessments, and require sufficient assurances of patient privacy. This thesis introduces mechanisms to dynamically generate an applicable security policy for medical information sharing systems. We present implementation-independent mechanisms that are capable of interoperating with different security settings at different sites to produce security configurations with significantly different characteristics and vulnerabilities. We also present a rules-based agent to assist in the selection process. This approach gives maximum freedom to generate the appropriate system according to the tradeoffs between cost, patient privacy, and data accessibility.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Cody, Patrick M. (Patrick Michael), 1980-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Peter Szolovits.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28473

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/28473