UCONLEGAL: a usage control model for HIPAA

  • Authors:
  • Ramya Gopalan;Annie Antón;Jon Doyle

  • Affiliations:
  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Developing an access control system that satisfies the requirements expressed in regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), can help ensure regulatory compliance in software systems. A usage control model that specifies the rules governing information access and usage, as expressed in law, is an important step towards achieving such compliance. Software systems that handle health records must comply with regulations in the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules. Herein, we analyze the HIPAA Privacy Rule using a grounded theory methodology coupled with an inquiry driven approach to determine the components that must be supported by a usage control model to achieve regulatory-compliant health records usage. In this paper, we propose a usage control model, UCONLEGAL, which extends UCONABC with components to model purposes, cross-references, exceptions, conditions, and logs. We also employ UCONLEGAL to show how to express the access and usage rules we identified in the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Our analysis yielded seven types of conditions specific to HIPAA that we include in UCONLEGAL; these conditions were previously unsupported by existing usage control models.