查看文章

The storage of health records in electronic format, and the wide-spread sharing of these records among different health care providers, have enormous potential benefits to the US healthcare system. These benefits include both improving the quality of health care delivered to patients and reducing the costs of delivering that care. However, maintaining the security of electronic health record systems and the privacy of the information they contain is paramount to ensure that patients have confidence in the use of such systems. In this paper, we propose a framework for electronic health record sharing that is patient centric, ie it provides patients with substantial control over how their information is shared and with whom; provides for verifiability of original sources of health information and the integrity of the data; and permits fine-grained decisions about when data can be shared based on the use of attribute-based techniques for authorization and access control. We present the architecture of the framework, describe a prototype system we have built based on it, and demonstrate its use within a scenario involving emergency responders’ access to health record information.