I've thought quite a bit about the approach you've outlined previously..
The main caveat I've always struggled to overcome is how to encapsulate *when* a physician should have access to your records. This expands the problem into n*m roles which becomes difficult to manage inside Accumulo, especially as time elapses.
On 8/8/2012 6:29 PM, Marc Parisi wrote:
Just some ideas and thoughts.... With a system I'm building I have code to take care of user roles. Roles will define visibilities, how analysis is performed, information sharing, etc. I have a particular role for sharing. I also have an area of interest, usually assigned to a physician role, therefore only a physician's office can see certain data from it. The data corresponding to a given person can be accessed by that person ( if they have app access ), the physician that created it, and other physicians ( with a different area of interest ) with whom the user wants to share their data. Each area of interest will be cryptographically secured. Our approach will utilize multiple crypto technologies. I would suggest making crypto your last stop. Focus on getting the visibility hierarchy designed. HIPAA requirements can come later. In my approach, there is no elevation of fields per se. Instead, there are visibiilities for all assigned parties,so in my case it is a matter of labeling. The data can have hierarchies, and each hierarchy has different labels to control access. " Patient demographic fields are PHI (personal health information) and these should not be visible to all who want to perform analysis, but only to main administrators, patient and maybe physician. I assume these would have to have separate authorization label. " Yes. I think this is where roles will help. Assign roles and visibilities to those roles. As of right now, I'm putting ephemeral data in my visibilities ( user ID for a physician, among other things ). I will probably move this to the qualifier and take a more simple approach to visibilities. Each role has different actions. Right now I have four actions; syncing, querying, deleting, and sharing. You don't have to capture actions, but you might want to limit how the roles of users vary, and I think modeling the security actions within each role is an excellent way to do so. On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Edmon Begoli <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I am trying to model the healthcare claim on accumulo and I want to lay it out so that it: A. Accurately reflects the structure of the claim B. I could have controls finely applied to different sections of the document I am simplifying matter but claim contains claim document identifiers, demographics of the patient, and line items for the procedures performed: claim identifier, data submitted, data processed, state of origin, ... patient name, dob, location, other identifiers procedure 1 code, procedure 1 provider, procedure 1 cost, ... ... procedure n code, procedure n provider, procedure n cost, ... Patient demographic fields are PHI (personal health information) and these should not be visible to all who want to perform analysis, but only to main administrators, patient and maybe physician. I assume these would have to have separate authorization label. Other fields may be visible to different groups of people - i.e. federal claim administrators can see all, but regional offices can only see their states. Separate, more permissive labels. Finally, it might make sense to "elevate" some fields for easy access and analysis - ie. diagnostic codes, zip code, cost. This would not be a matter of labels, but data design. With all this in mind, I would welcome if anyone has any security and data design suggestions.
