Formal policies for flexible EHR security.

State of the Art methodologies for establishing requirements and solutions to securing applications are based on narrative descriptions about the use of available system, sometimes also dedicated to system components. Even nowadays new developments to ruling application security services by the use of predicate logic suffer from being administered manually. Therefore, security and privacy requirements cannot be properly met resulting in restrictions and fears for allowing the use of sensitive data and functions. Because of the sensitivity of personal health information and especially of genetic data with its wider implications beyond the original subject of care, weaknesses in guaranteeing fine-grained security and privacy rules lead to less acceptance or even the avoidance of essential information transfer and use. To overcome the problem, security and privacy have to become properties of the architectural components of the respective health information system. Embedding security into the systems architecture allows for negotiating and enforcing any security and privacy services related to principals, their roles, their relationships, further contextual information as well as other regulations summarized in formally modeled policies. The paper introduces the evolving paradigm of the model-driven architecture, first time also comprehensively deployed for security and privacy services in bio-genetic and health information systems.