Emergency access for online personally controlled health records system

A personally controlled health records (PCHR) system allows a patient user to share his/her health records with trusted physicians by manually granting them the access privilege to his/her online records. However, it presents the problem of emergency access in situations where the user is physically unable to grant the access and the access is required by an Emergency Room (ER) physician who does not have the privilege at that moment. To deal with such a problem, we introduce an online polling system to provide the emergency access control to PCHR systems. For each emergency access request, the access privilege is controlled according to the combined opinions of the patient's preset emergency contacts and other online registered physicians. Because our system is based on the demographic number of the physician community nationwide, it provides a stable emergency access control at all times.