A Security Model and its Application to a Distributed Decision Support System for Healthcare

A distributed decision support system involving multiple clinical centres is crucial to the diagnosis of rare diseases. Although sharing of valid diagnosed cases can facilitate later decision making, possibly from geographically different centres, the released information could reveal patient privacy if it is not properly protected. Clinical centres may have to impose their distinct regulations and rules that govern the use of their data externally. The collaboration of centres, therefore, must respect the collective policies and ideally, serve users the most appropriate and useful resources possible in the system according to the past experience. In this way, the system’s value is entrusted and even elevated through continuous collaboration. We present in this paper a link-anonymised data scheme and in addition to that, a security model that together enforce privacy data security and secure resource access for distributed clinical centres. Our illustration of the approach involves a prototype medical decision support system, HealthAgents, for brain tumour diagnosis.