A Study On The Mechanism To Protect Document Metadata Privacy For The IHE-XDS

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprises (IHE) has developed a Cross-EnterpriseDocument Sharing (XDS) Framework that defines how the different agencies andpatients in a medical community and can share and exchange patient medicalinformation. With use of decentralized XDS medical documentation storage,centralized medical document metadata storage approach and a range of other securityframeworks developed by IHE, it has developed a secure and reliable inter-agencyhealth information exchange platform. However, as the XDS basis-medicaldocument metadata, although it contains patient’s privacy, the current frameworklacks privacy protection mechanisms to support its safety submission, storage andquery. This paper aims to study a mechanism which is suitable to the XDS-basedhealth information exchange process and can effectively protect the medical privacyof document metadata information. Following works are mentioned in this paper:1) Proposed a definition and protection mechanism of document metadatainformation privacy. The mechanism contains privacy views, privacy policies and aprivacy monitor. Privacy views are used to define document metadata privateinformation; Privacy policies are used to define privacy protection policies which canprotect document metadata privacy information; the privacy monitor is used to protectthe document metadata privacy in health information exchange process according torelevant privacy policies.2) Studied how to introduce document metadata information privacy protectionmechanisms into XDS framework, which involved technical improvements ofsubmission, storage and query affairs of document metadata. And proposed anextended XDS privacy protection framework which supports document metadataprotection. Integrated submission and storage of medical document metadata privacyinformation and protection policies basing on the original medical XDS and supportedfor dynamic definition of metadata privacy information.3) Based on an existing XDS reference implementation-Microsoft XDSReference Implementation, we achieved an extended XDS framework supportingdocument metadata privacy protection. Developed medical document metadataprivacy editor in order to allow users to define dynamically document metadataprivacy information and protection policies easily.4) Had experimental analysis and evaluation to the timeliness and effectivenessof submission of definition and protection of document metadata privacy, retrievalstrategy and transformation strategies. The experimental results showed that: theextended XDS framework can effectively protect privacy information documentmetadata without destroying the stability and timeliness of the original framework.