On the support of flexible patient privacy policies in social-medical discovery

Many new socially flavored medical services have recently emerged, utilizing the data openness and sharing through social channels. The adoption of such services by patients is still very limited, mainly due to privacy issues. Existing social-medical discovery services support only strict patient privacy policies and are not flexible enough to accommodate a wider range of privacy policy definitions. In this paper we present the IBM Medical Information and Care System (Medics) privacy-aware social-medical discovery solution that provides a highly flexible support for both fine-grained and dynamic patient privacy policies.