A semantic based methodology to classify and protect sensitive data in medical records

The e-Health is going to change the way how patients and healthcare providers interact. The exchange of confidential and integer information is one of the major open issues for the health care sector. While it is quite easy to enforce fine grain access control policies to new well structured medical records managed by newly designed information systems, many eHealth systems are based on “document management systems”. In the practice the system provides a digital version of the whole medical record and it is impossible to enforce fine grain access rules. In this paper we propose the adoption of a semantic based methodology that is able to automatically retrieve the security level associated to a portion of a medical record and use this information to classify resources and locate the proper security rules to apply.