Maintaining security in an ontology driven multi-agent system for electronic health records

The use of electronic health records (EHR) aim to improve the quality of healthcare by facilitating the exchange of patient information between healthcare providers. However, as disparate systems have varying techniques of representing and managing patient data, a multi-agent system (MAS) architecture was presented in a previous paper for consolidating this patient data. The architecture addresses the issues of interoperability, flexibility, and scalability through the use of multiple co-operating mobile agents that actively access, recognize and associate the various EHRs. The rapid adoption of EHRs has also prompted concerns about their security. An injudicious application of EHR systems introduces the type of security risks that plague current large scale network models. This paper continues the work presented in a paper by Wimalasiri et. al., by addressing the security and privacy needs of patients within a MAS to ensure that communication and co-operation within a distributed network of EHRs is not compromised.