Secure Interaction Models for the HealthAgents System

Abstract

Abstract. Distributed decision support systems designed for healthcare use can benefit from services and information available across a decentralised environment. The sophisticated nature of collaboration among involved partners who contribute services or sensitive data in this paradigm, however, demands careful attention from the beginning of designing such systems. Apart from the traditional need of secure data transmission across clinical centres, a more important issue arises from the need of consensus for access to system-wide resources by separately managed user groups from each centre. A primary concern is the determination of interactive tasks that should be made available to authorised users, and further the clinical resources that can be populated into interactions in compliance with user clinical roles and policies. To this end, explicit interaction modelling is put forward along with the contextual constraints within interactions that together enforce secure access, the interaction participation being governed by system-wide policies and local resource access being governed by node-wide policies. Clinical security requirements are comprehensively analysed, prior to the design and building of our security model. The application of the approach results in a Multi-Agent System driven by secure interaction models. This is illustrated using a prototype of the HealthAgents system.

The design and implementation of a novel security model for HealthAgents

“…Elsewhere in the continuous work of the project, we have described the security policy rule scheme and their Software Engineering support (Xiao et al ., 2007), as well as their full integration with functional rule model into the established Adaptive Agent Model (Xiao & Greer, 2007, 2009); the ontology support to the security policy representation and reasoning for consistency checking (Croitoru et al ., 2008); the development of the overall model according to major Software Engineering principles to achieve software quality (Xiao et al ., 2008a); and the extension of the security model into a layered architecture to meet closely related clinical requirements (Xiao et al ., 2008b). We believe this work has established a comprehensive and practically useful security model and can provide a valuable reference for other distributed health-care systems.…”

Mapping How Artificial Intelligence Blends with Healthcare: Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis

“…In the same vein, Glasspool et al [45] discussed DSS aimed at facilitating the planning of care actions to ensure they do not conflict with each other. Xiao et al [46,47] introduced the term "Distributed DSS" to describe systems with such characteristics. They emphasized that for such systems to function effectively, it is deemed necessary to ensure protected interaction through the delineation of clinical user roles and universally applied policies.…”

Towards a framework for certification of reliable autonomous systems

“…As we would expect, the ethical issues concerning such (potential) robots are of great interest to both philosophers and formal methods [11,25]. Interestingly, issues such as privacy and security are only gradually being considered [257].…”