Protecting privacy during peer-to-peer exchange of medical documents

Privacy is an important aspect of interoperable medical information systems. Governments and health care organizations have established privacy policies to prevent abuse of personal health data. These policies often require organizations to obtain patient consent prior to exchanging personal information with other interoperable systems. The consents are defined in form of so-called disclosure directives. However, policies are often not precise enough to address all possible eventualities and exceptions. Unanticipated priorities and other care contexts may cause conflicts between a patient’s disclosure directives and the need to receive treatments from informed caregivers. It is commonly agreed that in these situations patient safety takes precedence over information privacy. Therefore, caregivers are typically given the ability to override the patient’s disclosure directives to protect patient safety. These overrides must be logged and are subject to privacy audits to prevent abuse. Centralized “shared health record” (SHR) infrastructures include consent management systems that enact the above functionality. However, consent management mechanisms do not extend to information systems that exchange clinical information on a peer-to-peer basis, e.g., by secure messaging. Our article addresses this gap by presenting a consent management mechanism for peer-to-peer interoperable systems. The mechanism restricts access to sensitive, medical data based on defined consent directives, but also allows overriding the policies when needed. The overriding process is monitored and audited in order to prevent misuse. The mechanism has been implemented in an open source project called CDAShip and has been made available on SourceForge.