SGAC: A patient-centered access control method

This paper presents SGAC(Solution de Gestion Automatisée du Consentement, automatised consent management solution), a new healthcare access control model and its support tool, that manages patient wishes regarding access to their electronic health record (EHR). The development of this model has been achieved in the scope of a project with the Sherbrooke University Hospital, and thus has been adapted to take into account laws and regulations applicable in Québec and Canada, as they set bounds to patient wishes: under strictly defined contexts, patient consent can be overridden to protect his/her life. Moreover, since patient wishes and laws can be in conflict, SGAC provides a mechanism to address this problem. Besides, laws do not cover all cases where consent should be overridden to ensure patient safety. To this end, we define a formal model of SGAC which allows for property verification, making it possible to detect these cases. A performance comparison with XACML (WSO2/Balana) is presented and demonstrates the superior performances of SGAC.