School of Computing

Access Control: how can it improve patients' healthcare?

Ana Ferreira, Ricardo Cruz-Correia, Luis Antunes, and David Chadwick

In International Council on Medical and Care Compunetics (ICMCC 2007), Amsterdam, pages 182-196, June 2007.

Abstract

The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is a very important support tool for patients and healthcare professionals but it has some barriers that prevent its successful integration within the healthcare practice. These barriers comprise not only security concerns but also costs, in terms of time and effort, as well as relational and educational issues that can hinder its proper use. Access control is an essential part of the EMR and provides for its confidentiality by checking if a user has the necessary rights to access the resources he/she requested. This paper comprehensively reviews the published material about access control in healthcare. The review reveals that most of the access control systems that are published in the literature are just studies or prototypes in which healthcare professionals and patients did not participate in the definition of the access control policies, models or mechanisms. Healthcare professionals usually needed to change their workflow patterns and adapt their tasks and processes in order to use the systems. If access control could be improved according to the users� needs and be properly adapted to their workflow patterns we hypothesise that some of the barriers to the effective use of EMR could be reduced. Then EMR could be more successfully integrated into the healthcare practice and provide for better patient treatment.

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Bibtex Record

@conference{2792,
author = {Ana Ferreira and Ricardo Cruz-Correia and Luis Antunes and David Chadwick },
title = {{A}ccess {C}ontrol: how can it improve patients' healthcare?},
month = {June},
year = {2007},
pages = {182-196},
keywords = {determinacy analysis, Craig interpolants},
note = {},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2007/2792},
    publication_type = {conference},
    submission_id = {2728_1218032226},
    booktitle = {International Council on Medical and Care Compunetics (ICMCC 2007), Amsterdam},
}

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