e-CRL: A Rule-Based Language for Expressing Patient Electronic Consent

Since the advent of the Web, the health domain is progressively adopting emerging technologies what forces new paradigms, concepts and tools to be defined. Electronic consent is one of them. This recently defined notion aims at formalising electronically the agreement of the patient on sharing personal health information. However, existing approaches dealing with electronic consent do not provide the adequate concepts to express, in an unambiguous manner, patients’ wishes with respect to the access and management of their personal health data. To correct this lack, we propose the e-CRL language. This language has been designed in order to facilitate the capture and to formalise the expression of patients’ consent regarding the access and management of their health information. In this paper, we first discuss the objective such language must fulfil, we then introduce the syntax and the semantics of the e-CRL language and we eventually give some examples of e-CRL rules.