An interoperable security framework for connected healthcare

Connected and interoperable healthcare system promises to reduce the cost of healthcare delivery, increase its efficiency and enable consumers to better engage with clinicians and manage their care. However at the same time it introduces new risks towards security and privacy of personal health information, which are considered to be prominent impediments towards the realization of full benefits of connected healthcare. In the connected healthcare system of future, different security technologies will be used to address security risks in different trust domains. For the domain of personal health and healthy lifestyle services, which is less trusted, additional security mechanisms (e.g. digital rights management) are required next to access control which is traditionally used in the professional medical domain. To realize the vision of connected health, all these mechanisms should be interoperable with each other. In this paper we provide an interoperability framework which allows digital rights management and access control systems to seamlessly work together through the use of ontology.