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2020 Volume 35
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RESEARCH ARTICLE   Open Access    

Enacting policies in digital health: a case for smart legal contracts and distributed ledgers?

  • Deontik Pty Ltd, 2/10 Buna Street, Brisbane, QLD4032, Australia e-mail: zoran@deontik.com

  • This is an extended version of the paper presented at the 3rd Symposium On Distributed Ledger Technology, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia (Milosevic 2018)

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  • Abstract: This paper presents an approach for the enactment of policies in digital health based on our earlier work on the implementation of digital contracts in distributed systems. A formal policy model and an abstract policy language for the expression of healthcare policies are first proposed, leveraging the semantics of the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing enterprise language standard. Healthcare consent policies included in the HL7 Fast Health Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) standard are used to illustrate the modelling approach. Several distributed ledger and smart legal contract options were considered next as target platforms for implementation. Their benefits are highlighted along with considerations on their use reflecting business concerns of risk, trust and cost.
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  • Cite this article

    Zoran Milosevic. 2020. Enacting policies in digital health: a case for smart legal contracts and distributed ledgers?. The Knowledge Engineering Review 35(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888920000089
    Zoran Milosevic. 2020. Enacting policies in digital health: a case for smart legal contracts and distributed ledgers?. The Knowledge Engineering Review 35(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888920000089
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RESEARCH ARTICLE   Open Access    

Enacting policies in digital health: a case for smart legal contracts and distributed ledgers?

  • Deontik Pty Ltd, 2/10 Buna Street, Brisbane, QLD4032, Australia e-mail: zoran@deontik.com

  • Received: 13 June 2019
  • Revised: 08 January 2020
  • Accepted: 10 January 2020
  • Published online: 12 February 2020
The Knowledge Engineering Review  35,  2020, 35(1)  |  Cite this article

Abstract: Abstract: This paper presents an approach for the enactment of policies in digital health based on our earlier work on the implementation of digital contracts in distributed systems. A formal policy model and an abstract policy language for the expression of healthcare policies are first proposed, leveraging the semantics of the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing enterprise language standard. Healthcare consent policies included in the HL7 Fast Health Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) standard are used to illustrate the modelling approach. Several distributed ledger and smart legal contract options were considered next as target platforms for implementation. Their benefits are highlighted along with considerations on their use reflecting business concerns of risk, trust and cost.

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    Acknowledgments

    • I would like to thank Dr Andrew Berry (Deontik) for his input to the earlier version of this paper and to Dr Florian Herzog (Deon, Digital) for fruitful discussions about the importance of legal semantics to smart contracts. I would also like to thank Grahame, Grieve (Health Intersections), for his insights regarding the FHIR® consent resource and for his outstanding technical contribution, vision and efforts in driving the HL7 FHIR® agenda.

    • Some references such as Lonsetteig (2017) do not consider Corda as a DLT technology but a shared ledger or even a business-to-business messaging protocol that is inspired by bitcoin. For the purpose of this paper, we do treat Corda as a DLT, as introduced in the Corda white paper (Brown et al.2016).

    • In some cases, torts laws or contractual mechanisms could come into play, complicating legal responsibility questions.

    • There are many legal questions to be addressed regarding the responsibility of autonomous decision-makers, as demonstrated by the recent Google autonomous car case (The Conversation, 2019), as well as the specification of the responsibilities of the parties involved in the design and deployment of AI systems.

    • Note that a similar event pattern language to that of the BCL event pattern language was successfully used in supporting real-time analytics solutions (Berry & Milosevic, 2013)

    • This is an extended version of the paper presented at the 3rd Symposium On Distributed Ledger Technology, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia (Milosevic 2018)

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    Zoran Milosevic. 2020. Enacting policies in digital health: a case for smart legal contracts and distributed ledgers?. The Knowledge Engineering Review 35(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888920000089
    Zoran Milosevic. 2020. Enacting policies in digital health: a case for smart legal contracts and distributed ledgers?. The Knowledge Engineering Review 35(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888920000089
    shu

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