Enhancing Patient Information Sharing through Social Networks

Currently, there is an effort for empowering patient self-care and improving the traditional healthcare delivery models by expanding the concept of healthcare though the provision of advanced online healthcare services. Those services require increased level of information flow and collaboration among patients and healthcare professionals. This collaboration and patient information sharing can be achieved by integrating social networks functionality with personal health records, based on open standards. In fact, social networking exists to facilitate communication and collaboration and make possible what was only recently impractical in healthcare, such as trans-regional clinician collaboration through web-based broadcasting systems, therefore integrating the information included into personal health records. Along these lines, this paper presents a secure middleware that aims at enabling patient information sharing among patients and healthcare professionals through social networks functionality and applications, giving particular emphasis to a security architecture that enforces access control services for protecting the disclosure of patient private information to unauthorized users.