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Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics

Date Submitted: Jan 15, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 19, 2018 - Mar 29, 2018
Date Accepted: Dec 14, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

OpenEHR and General Data Protection Regulation: Evaluation of Principles and Requirements

Gonçalves-Ferreira D, Sousa M, Bacelar-Silva GM, Frade S, Antunes LF, Beale T, Cruz-Correia R

OpenEHR and General Data Protection Regulation: Evaluation of Principles and Requirements

JMIR Med Inform 2019;7(1):e9845

DOI: 10.2196/medinform.9845

PMID: 30907730

PMCID: 6452286

Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

OpenEHR and General Data Protection Regulation: Evaluation of Principles and Requirements

  • Duarte Gonçalves-Ferreira; 
  • Mariana Sousa; 
  • Gustavo M Bacelar-Silva; 
  • Samuel Frade; 
  • Luís Filipe Antunes; 
  • Thomas Beale; 
  • Ricardo Cruz-Correia

Background:

Concerns about privacy and personal data protection resulted in reforms of the existing legislation in the European Union (EU). The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to reform the existing directive on the topic of personal data protection of EU citizens with a strong emphasis on more control of the citizens over their data and in the establishment of rules for the processing of personal data. OpenEHR is a standard that embodies many principles of interoperable and secure software for electronic health records (EHRs) and has been advocated as the best approach for the development of hospital information systems.

Objective:

This study aimed to understand to what extent the openEHR standard can help in the compliance of EHR systems to the GDPR requirements.

Methods:

A list of requirements for an EHR to support GDPR compliance and also a list of the openEHR design principles were made. The requirements were categorized and compared with the principles by experts on openEHR and GDPR.

Results:

A total of 50 GDPR requirements and 8 openEHR design principles were identified. The openEHR principles conformed to 30% (15/50) of GDPR requirements. All the openEHR principles were aligned with GDPR requirements.

Conclusions:

This study showed that the openEHR principles conform well to GDPR, underlining the common wisdom that truly realizing security and privacy requires it to be built in from the start. By using an openEHR-based EHR, the institutions are closer to becoming compliant with GDPR while safeguarding the medical data.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Gonçalves-Ferreira D, Sousa M, Bacelar-Silva GM, Frade S, Antunes LF, Beale T, Cruz-Correia R

OpenEHR and General Data Protection Regulation: Evaluation of Principles and Requirements

JMIR Med Inform 2019;7(1):e9845

DOI: 10.2196/medinform.9845

PMID: 30907730

PMCID: 6452286

Per the author's request the PDF is not available.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.