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Chapter 3
A Context-Aware Authorization
Model for Process-Oriented
Personal Health Record Systems
Eleni Mytilinaiou
University of Piraeus, Greece
Vassiliki Kouf
University of Piraeus, Greece
Flora Malamateniou
University of Piraeus, Greece
George Vassilacopoulos
University of Piraeus, Greece
abstraCt
Healthcare delivery is a highly complex process involving a broad range of healthcare services, typically
performed by a number of geographically distributed and organizationally disparate healthcare provid-
ers requiring increased collaboration and coordination of their activities in order to provide shared and
integrated care. Under an IT-enabled, patient-centric model, health systems can integrate care delivery
across the continuum of services, from prevention to follow-up, and also coordinate care across all set-
tings. In particular, much potential can be realized if cooperation among disparate healthcare organiza-
tions is expressed in terms of cross-organizational healthcare processes, where information support is
provided by means of Personal Health Record (PHR) systems. This chapter assumes a process-oriented
PHR system and presents a security framework that addresses the authorization and access control issues
arisen in these systems. The proposed framework ensures provision of tight, just-in-time permissions so
that authorized users get access to specifc objects according to the current context. These permissions
are subject to continuous adjustments triggered by the changing context. Thus, the risk of compromising
information integrity during task executions is reduced.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61692-895-7.ch003