Privacy-Aware Agent-Oriented Architecture for Distributed eHealth Systems

Distributed Integrated ehealth systems are becoming a key need for achieving improved healthcare, in which healthcare processes across organisations must work in tandem to achieve this goal. However, at its core, enabling data-sharing safely while maintaining privacy and confidentiality is a critical requirement. The wide spread of electronic health record systems to manage health data and healthcare processes may provide the needed infrastructure to facilitate data-sharing. However, most of these systems are often designed to work within localised settings and rarely across organisations. In a health service, organisations and individuals are autonomous and often obey different data governance policies and would require different levels of data-sharing needs, depending on their roles and goals within the service. This would make agent-oriented architecture a strong candidate to enable privacy-aware seamless data-sharing between participating organisations. The paper presents an approach for privacy-preserving agent-oriented architecture that enables organisations to work together overcoming sharing sensitive data and evaluates its use within a real-life project.