Assuring Privacy of Medical Records in an Open Collaborative Environment - A Case Study of Walloon Region's eHealth Platform

摘要

In many European countries, elderly citizens constitute a growing part of the population. In some countries like Belgium, it is expected to be as high as one third of the population by 2060. Non-traditional high-tech healthcare solutions are therefore indispensable to cope with the shortage of medical and paramedical staff in the future. In this context, several eHealth projects are launched to modernise the public healthcare system and to address the challenges of declining active workforce in the medical domain. The Walloon Region of Belgium is sponsoring an eHealth Platform for the deployment of internet-based technologies for monitoring of patients and exchange of medical records between hospitals and general practitioners. In this paper, we provide an overview of this eHealth platform and report on-going design activities on managing privacy-sensitive medical data by using a context-aware access control model.