A semantic access control for easy management of the privacy for EHR systems

In the last years, the increasingly use of ICT in Healthcare has led to the generation of several healthcare information systems, such as Electronic Health Record systems, which enable the management and sharing of digital clinical data. Since clinical data is generally characterized by very sensitive information, such information systems have to be able to limit their sharing of it, by enabling or denying access to the various healthcare users. In order to manage who can do what on such data, there is so need to use access control mechanisms, which have to be able to satisfy access policies defined by the patient in a dynamic manner. This paper presents a semantic access control designed for specifying flexible and fine-grained access policies in the HIS. The proposed model is based on an ontological approach able to increase the usability and feasibility of real information systems.