Healthcare is an increasingly collaborative enterprise involving many individuals and organizations that coordinate their efforts toward promoting quality and efficient delivery of healthcare through the use of pervasive healthcare information systems. The latter can provide seamless access to well-informed, high-quality healthcare services anywhere, anytime by removing temporal, spatial and other constraints imposed by the technological heterogeneity of existing healthcare information systems. In such environments, concerns over the privacy and security of health information arise. Hence, it is essential to provide an effective access control mechanism that meets the requirements imposed by the least privilege principle by adjusting user permissions continuously in order to adapt to the current situation. This chapter presents a pervasive grid-based healthcare information system architecture that facilitates authorized access to healthcare processes via wireless devices. Context-aware technologies are used to both automate healthcare processes and regulate access to services and data via a fine-grained access control mechanism.
The Australian PCEHR System: Ensuring Privacy and Security through an Improved Access Control Mechanism
