Trust establishment in emergency case

Abstract

Access to medical information, e.g. current medication, blood group, and allergies, is often vital, especially in case of emergency. An emergency physician has to know medication incompatibilities and to access to the patient's treatment history. It raises the issue of patient's privacy. Thus a patient grants access to his medical information to his physician because he has a pre-established trust relationship with this physician. But he wants to prevent any other physician to gain access to his medical information. In emergency case, due to the patient's unconsciousness, it is difficult to establish a trust relationship between patient and emergency physician. In our demonstration, we show how to exploit context information to address the problem of granting access to medical information without a pre-established trust relationship between an emergency physician and a patient. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.