A Self-Protecting Security Framework for CDA Documents

Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is a standard for the exchange of electronic medical records. This paper describes a self-protecting security framework for protecting the security and privacy of CDA documents. The framework extends a CDA document with markups from XML based security standards including eXtensible Access Control Markup Language, XML Encryption, and XML Signature. This integrated structure uses a CDA document as the container while access control policies, digital signatures, and encrypted data are all embedded within the same CDA document in a fine-grained manner. The paper also describes an initial prototype implementation of this self-protecting security framework for CDA documents.