Health Care Profile

Full Title or Meme

This Health Care Profile is one of the Framework Profiles that will allow developers of code and user experience to determine if their systems are compliant with the framework.

Context

• This profile is oriented to federated health systems like that in the United States. Still the privacy considerations should apply to all, especially to cross boarder access.
• As a part of the creation of a set of Identity Ecosystems this profile is targeted to apply to any framework that handle user Protected Health Information (PHI).
• The effort to standardize PHI transfers has been steadily progress for years under pressure from the ONH, but many health providers view user's PHI as their proprietary asset.
• Now Apple has entered the equations with their health app which has gone directly to the health providers to acquire PHI as well as generating it on their own from the Apple watch. Now they are a PHI provider themselves, and presumably subject to all the regulation that entails.

Identifiers for Patients

Several countries have started an effort to create a central registry of all citizens or, in some cases, all residents. The US has determined that the social security number (SSN) is not a secure means of identification and has mandated that many agencies will need to create their own Identifiers. This has not yet impacted medicare nor the providers' database keys which are still base on the SSN.

• The Center for Medicare Services recently deployed a new Identifier for users of Medicare that is not tied to the user's social security number.
• Pew research report Enhanced Patient Matching Is Critical to Achieving Full Promise of Digital Health Records, and to prevent harm through faulty health history information. This is defiantly not patient oriented (and that is not a typo.) When they did ask patients what they wanted it was consistently shown that patients want all of the benefit of matching, with none of the downside of loss of privacy. They also found that Republican voters didn't want the government involved at all.

1. System oriented solution needs unique patient identifiers - but what they really mean is mandatory patient IDs for life.
2. Patient oriented solutions, like Smart Phones and QR codes, fit in better with the goal to give patients access an control of their private information.
3. Demographic matching, bio-metrics, disease history, whatever (maybe even the old standard, the social security number).
4. Referential

• The Department of Homeland security will be enforcing Real ID by October 2020 for travel as well as border crossings.
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has created a SID.
• The US Treasury (for the IRS) is planning for a tax payer ID.
• The Department of Defense has issued PIV cards for access to national defense information (and has propagated that system to NATO).

All of these should result in the user's Identity being separated for the various uses. This appears to be an example of the sort of Distributed ID that many organizations are now promoting. Obviously all the law enforcement agencies will ask for the unfettered ability to cross reference these Identifiers from any source what-so-ever. Hopefully the API that allows access to that tracking functionality will be well protected.

Identifiers for Providers

• CMS Advances Interoperability & Patient Access to Health Data through New Proposals

  Today, February 11, 2019, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed policy changes supporting its MyHealthEData initiative to improve patient access and advance electronic data exchange and care coordination throughout the healthcare system. The Interoperability and Patient Access Proposed Rule outlines opportunities to make patient data more useful and transferable through open, secure, standardized, and machine-readable formats while reducing restrictive burdens on healthcare providers.

Stakeholders

• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) has international participation. Of particular interest here might be the Privacy and Consents page.

Problems

• Some of the stakeholders are reluctant to share patient information that they consider to be proprietary.
• Different organizations of providers (regions, VA, etc.) have created their own taxa and procedures that are not cross-compatible.

Solutions

UX Ecosystem https://blog.prototypr.io/ux-ecosystems-in-healthcare-4c244c386253

Use Cases

• Emergency Contact Information Use Case - How users construct a collection of contact information that can be access by First Responders.
• Patient with Lab and Referral Use Case - Normal patient at a normal doctors' offices with lab work for sensitive disease (say hepatitis) and referral to a specialist in a different practice.
• Patient under 13 and Homeless Use Case - Homeless child under the age of 13 being registered by a school nurse and subsequent diagnosis with a public health issue - say measles
• The page Health IT Record Location Service (Data Aggregation) contains a use case for locating user PHI.
• Alice consents to safely receive and share her health information with any user of her choice that uses modern, patient-centric security and respects her privacy preferences
• Patient Experience wiki page.
• Controlling Access to Health Data from the UMA use cases.

References

• The page Health Care Profile Sandbox details a test suite that will allow developers of code and user experience to assure the compliance of their products to the framework.
• The US Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a yearlong effort to foster innovation on 2018-11-21.
• European Federation of Nurses working on user centric health data.
• Summary of the European Commission’s eHealth Strategy
• European Health ePolicy
• ISO 22600-1:2014 Health informatics -- Privilege management and access control -- Part 1: Overview and policy management
• HIPPA - Legislation - § 164.414(b) Burden of proof. In the event of a use or disclosure in violation of subpart E, the covered entity or business associate, as applicable, shall have the burden of demonstrating that all notifications were made as required by this subpart or that the use or disclosure did not constitute a breach, as defined at § 164.402.
• Kantara HEART WG

  HEART (Health Relationship Trust) is a set of profiles that enables patients to control how, when, and with whom their clinical data is shared. The HEART model builds on existing state-of-the-art security and adds additional components to ensure that patient clinical data is securely exchanged. In addition to giving patients control over how their own data is shared, HEART defines the interoperable process for systems to exchange patient-authorized healthcare data consistent with open standards, specifically FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), OAuth, OpenID Connect, and UMA (User-Managed Access).

• HIE of one

  Our solution is a patient-centered approach to privacy protection in cloud computing and information based on digital consent standards, blockchain identity, and blockchain audit. This enables each patient and each licensed practitioner to own and completely control their open source connected health records within a secure environment.