Medical Roles/Permissions Ontology

Ping Wang Tetherless World ConstellationRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Outline

• Introduction

• Research question

• Approach

• Related Work

• Status

• Hope to learn

Introduction

• Health information technology can allow clinicians to have real-time access to complete patient data, and provide them with support to make the best possible decisions. [1]

• The impact of IT on healthcare has so far been modest. [1]

http://www.cahealthit.com/

Research question

• Achieve fine-grained control of EHRs (Electronic Health Record) via semantic technologies– Fine-grained: roles, the permissions of

roles vary from time/place to time/place– Semantic technologies: ontology, reasoner,

triple-store

Approach

• 1. Survey related works

• 2. Use Case Design

• 3. Categorize and assimilate data

• 4. Design the architecture of the system and the ontologies needed

• 5. Implementation of the system

• 6. Evaluate the system

Related Work 1: ROWLBAC [2]

• ROWLBAC - Representing Role Based Access Control in OWL

• Two different ways to support the RBAC(Role Based Access Control) model in OWL.

• Approach 1: Roles as Classes

• Approach 2: Roles as Values

• Advantage of approach1– queries about a particular access request

and queries about a general class of access requests can be answered efficiently using a standard DL reasoner

• Advantage of approach2– the specification is simpler and more

concise

Related Work 2: An Analysis of Roles [3]

• Gives a broad scope of roles– Roles in ontologies, – ER (Entity Relationship) Modeling, – Object Oriented Modeling, – Agent Oriented Modeling, – Object Process Methodology

• Roles VS classes, entities, responsibilities/functions, positions

• A context-Centered Approach to Roles

• A application: roles in SOP (Standard Operating Procedures)– The sop is for professionals involved in

carrying out clinical trials

Related Work 3: RIM [4]

• RIM (Reference Information Model) from HL7– a large, pictorial representation of the HL7

clinical data (domains) – identifies the life cycle that a message or

groups of related messages will carry– a shared model between all domains – the model from which all domains create

their messages

• Critiques – Unclarity: "Act"– Where are diseases– HL7 datastores inaccessible to the DL-

based reasoners because of the many ‘flavors of null’.

Status

• Have done partial survey

• Next steps:– Continue the survey– Determine the scope of the project

Hope to learn

• Knowledge modeling via ontologies

• Data access rules about HER

• More semantic technologies: – rdf, owl, jena, pellet

Reference

• [1] President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) Health Information Technology Report

• [2] T. Finin, A. Joshi, L. Kagal, J. Niu, R. Sandhu, W. Winsborough, and B. Thuraisingham, ROWLBAC - Representing Role Based Access Control in OWL, Proceedings of the 13th ACM symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, ACM Press New York, June 2008.

• [3] F. Loebe. An analysis of roles. Technical Report 6, Research Group Ontologies in Medicine, University of Leipzig, 2003. Onto-Med Report.

• [4] http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/rim.cfm• [5] Barry Smith. Ontology Research Group, Buffalo. HL7 RIM.

• Thank you!

• Questions?