Policy Management for E-Health Records

The ability to share electronic health records across healthcare providers plays a large role in the prediction that electronic health record systems will revolutionize the healthcare industry in the United States. Sharing health records raises the obvious question of how to implement access control in this distributed domain. The answer to which is not simply an architecture that can enforce the necessarily complex access control policies, but also knowledge of who will manage the policies and how they will manage them. Achieving this goal requires user-centered design methods and empirical evaluations of interfaces that facilitate finegrained policy management. Policy management is a task that is difficult for users but is essential to an electronic health record system that permits sharing among users.