Secure interaction models for the HealthAgents system

Abstract

Distributed decision support systems designed for healthcare use can benefit from services and information available across a decentralised environment. The sophisticated nature of collaboration among involved partners who contribute services or sensitive data in this paradigm, however, demands careful attention from the beginning of designing such systems. Apart from the traditional need of secure data transmission across clinical centres, a more important issue arises from the need of consensus for access to system-wide resources by separately managed user groups from each centre. A primary concern is the determination of interactive tasks that should be made available to authorised users, and further the clinical resources that can be populated into interactions in compliance with user clinical roles and policies. To this end, explicit interaction modelling is put forward along with the contextual constraints within interactions that together enforce secure access, the interaction participation being governed by system-wide policies and local resource access being governed by node-wide policies. Clinical security requirements are comprehensively analysed, prior to the design and building of our security model. The application of the approach results in a Multi-Agent System driven by secure interaction models. This is illustrated using a prototype of the HealthAgents system. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.