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Enacting policies in digital health: a case for smart legal contracts and distributed ledgers?

Part of: Distributed Ledger Technologies: Papers Arising from Three Australian Symposia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2020

Zoran Milosevic Open the ORCID record for Zoran Milosevic [Opens in a new window]
Zoran Milosevic*
Affiliation:
Deontik Pty Ltd, 2/10 Buna Street, Brisbane, QLD4032, Australia e-mail: zoran@deontik.com
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Abstract

This paper presents an approach for the enactment of policies in digital health based on our earlier work on the implementation of digital contracts in distributed systems. A formal policy model and an abstract policy language for the expression of healthcare policies are first proposed, leveraging the semantics of the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing enterprise language standard. Healthcare consent policies included in the HL7 Fast Health Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) standard are used to illustrate the modelling approach. Several distributed ledger and smart legal contract options were considered next as target platforms for implementation. Their benefits are highlighted along with considerations on their use reflecting business concerns of risk, trust and cost.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Knowledge Engineering Review , Volume 35 , 2020 , e6
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2020

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Footnotes

*

This is an extended version of the paper presented at the 3rd Symposium On Distributed Ledger Technology, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia (Milosevic 2018)

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