Towards persistent control over shared information in a collaborative environment

In a complex collaborative environment, such as healthcare, where Multi-Disciplinary care Team (MDT) members and information come from independent organisational domains, there is a need for information-sharing across the organizations’ information systems in order to achieve the overall goal of collaboration. Inability to provide a secure communication method, giving local/global protection is affecting inter-professional communications and hindering sharing among MDT members. This research aims to facilitate a secure collaborative environment enabling persistent control over shared information across boundaries of the organisations that own the data. This paper is based on the early stages of the research and its results will feed into following stages. It looks at the structure of a healthcare system to understand the types of inter-professional communication and information exchange that occur in practice. Additionally it presents an initial assessment identifying the Information Security (IS) needs and challenges faced in providing persistent control in a shared collaborative environment by using conceptual modelling of a selected medical scenario (breast cancer in Wales). The results show that a considerable number of professionals are involved in a patient’s treatment. Each plays a well-defined role, but often uses different Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) to store sensitive and confidential patient medical information. These HIS cannot provide secure multi-organisational information-sharing to support collaboration among the MDT members. This causes inter-professional communication issues among team members that inhibit decision-making using the information. The findings from this study show how to improve information support from HIS stored information for MDT members. Also the resulting IS functions will be described which facilitate establishing secure collaborative environments guaranteeing persistent control over shared information