Consent-Indexed Healthcare Data Search for Fine-Grained Access
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing healthcare data access control systems face challenges in enforcing fine-grained consent-based access control for private healthcare data, particularly in large-scale data stores, due to issues with illegitimate consent scenarios, scalability, and conflicts in permit and deny consents, which traditional systems like Keycloak, Okta, and FHIR operations struggle to address effectively.
Innovation Solution
A consent-indexed healthcare data store is implemented, where each healthcare data record is indexed with consent attributes (actor, purpose, environment, and time period) to enable efficient index-based searching, using a search filter to determine permitted access while handling conflicts and ensuring compliance with consent directives.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional access control systems (Keycloak, Okta, FHIR operations) are used for healthcare data access control, then basic authentication and authorization can be provided, but they struggle to effectively address fine-grained consent-based access control, scalability, and conflicts in permit and deny consents
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments consent control into distinct permit and deny consent scenarios, each independently managed and indexed. This segmentation allows the system to handle complex consent conflicts by processing permit and deny scenarios separately, then resolving conflicts through a defined precedence mechanism, thereby improving reliability without overwhelming system complexity
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary indexing of consent scenarios before data access is requested. Consent scenarios are pre-indexed with their attributes (actor, purpose, environment, time period) so that when an access request comes in, the system can quickly retrieve and evaluate relevant consents without performing complex real-time analysis, thus improving reliability while maintaining manageable system complexity
2Reliability
If healthcare data is stored without consent indexing, then data storage is simpler, but enforcing fine-grained consent-based access control becomes difficult and inefficient
Solution Approach 1:
The data store structure is segmented into healthcare data records and separate consent scenarios. Each consent scenario is independently indexed with its attributes, allowing the system to enforce fine-grained consent control by querying the indexed consent scenarios rather than searching through all data records, thereby improving enforcement capability without proportionally increasing store structure complexity
Solution Approach 2:
The patent adds a consent scenario dimension to the data store structure, organizing consents by their attributes (actor, purpose, environment, time period) rather than storing them alongside data records. This dimensional reorganization enables efficient consent-based filtering and access control while keeping the overall store structure manageable through indexing
3Productivity
If indexed search is performed on consent-protected healthcare data, then efficient retrieval of permitted data is enabled, but the system must handle conflicts between permit and deny consents
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary indexing of consent scenarios with their attributes before data retrieval is needed. This pre-indexing allows the system to efficiently query and retrieve only the relevant consent scenarios for a given data access request, improving retrieval efficiency. The conflict resolution logic is simplified because the indexed structure pre-organizes consents by attributes, making it easier to apply conflict resolution rules
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the search process into distinct phases: retrieving permit consents, retrieving deny consents, and resolving conflicts between them. This segmentation allows the system to handle conflicts systematically by processing permit and deny scenarios separately first, then applying conflict resolution rules only to the relevant subset, thereby improving retrieval efficiency while keeping conflict resolution logic manageable
Data Source
AI summary
A method of index searching of consent-protected private healthcare data includes receiving, from a computing device, a search request for access to consent-protected healthcare data stored at a consent-indexed healthcare data store. The request includes one or more consent parameters asserted for a user of the computing device. The method also includes identifying one or more asserted access consent scenarios for accessing the requested consent-protected healthcare data based on the one or more consent parameters, each asserted access consent scenario of the one or more asserted access consent scenarios representing a respective subset of the one or more consent parameters. The method further includes defining a search filter based on the one or more asserted access consent scenarios and determining, via an indexed search of the data store using the search filter, a subset of the requested data. The method includes providing the subset of data to the computing device.