Emergency access for online personally controlled health records system

Abstract

A personally controlled health records (PCHR) system allows a patient user to share his/her health records with trusted physicians by manually granting them the access privilege to his/her online records. However, it presents the problem of emergency access in situations where the user is physically unable to grant the access and the access is required by an Emergency Room (ER) physician who does not have the privilege at that moment. To deal with such a problem, we introduce an online polling system to provide the emergency access control to PCHR systems. For each emergency access request, the access privilege is controlled according to the combined opinions of the patient's preset emergency contacts and other online registered physicians. Because our system is based on the demographic number of the physician community nationwide, it provides a stable emergency access control at all times.

Keywords:

• Emergency access
• online polling
• personally controlled health records

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and the great suggestions on the parameter setting issue and the statistical analysis methods.

Declaration of Interest: We are not responsible for the legal consequences if anybody chooses to use this system.

Notes

1. Note that there might be some legal issues involved before such a system is deployed and run by the PCHR providers. Since we are only interested in proposing a practical technical solution for the emergency access in the PCHR system, we leave these issues to professionals in the legal system.