Actors: A goal-driven approach for capturing and managing consent in e-health systems

Abstract—The notion of patient’s consent plays a major role in granting access to medical data. In typical healthcare systems, consent is captured by a form that the patient has to fill in and sign. In e-Health systems, the paper-form consent is being replaced by the integration of the notion of consent in the mechanisms that regulate the access to the medical data. This helps in empowering the patient with the capability of granting and revoking consent in a more effective manner. However, the process of granting and revoking consent greatly varies according to the situation in which the patient is. Our main argument is that such a level of detail is very difficult and error-prone to capture as a set of authorisation policies. In this paper, we present ACTORS, a goal-driven approach to manage consent. The main idea behind ACTORS is to leverage the goal-driven approach of Teleo-Reactive (TR) programming for managing consent that takes into account changes regarding the domains and contexts in which the patient is providing her consent