Towards a Patient-Centered Virtual Hospital Ecosystem: A Fine Grained VHealth-AC Model for Hospitals’ Legacy Information Systems

Virtual hospitals empower traditional hospitals to deliver more accessible, affordable, and comprehensive patient-centered (PC) care services. However, traditional hospitals’ legacy information systems are ill-equipped to support virtual hospitals’ needs. This is due to their deployed disease-centered access control (AC) models with multiple inconsistent policies, which pose risks on information whenever shared across- hospitals’ boundaries. Therefore, this study bridges the gap in AC literature with a novel model that can mitigate the risks in legacy information systems to be incorporated into virtual hospital settings securely. This paper proposes a granular VHealth-AC model that seamlessly grants healthcare practitioners at a hub hospital remote access to such PC data at the right point of care. We deploy a granular 5-tier PC information classification scheme to enforce these information security rules across-hospitals. In addition, we validated the feasibility of the proposed model design through a technical wrapper implementation on top of autonomous heterogeneous information systems. This design represents the neutral collaboration context security domain (i.e virtual hospital ecosystem) where the virtual healthcare service points of care are held following a patient’s treatment plan. Our unique VHealth-AC model for virtual hospital ecosystems will encourage the development of secure virtual hospitals, in general, and the practice of virtual healthcare services, in particular, for a secure personalized care.