Identifying Materialized Privacy Claims of Clinical-Care Metadata Share using Process-Mining and REA ontology

Metadata formation, maintenance, and interoperability are crucial for long-term, effective usage of valuable digital information across domains. Metadata interoperability especially triggers privacy concerns regarding personally identifiable information of data subjects when sensitive clinical-care metadata is shared amongst multiple caregivers. The problem intensifies when the care metadata share across caregivers is considered essentially significant for an efficient care system. Patients’ un-anonymized care metadata share across caregivers is validated using a real-world Sepsis dataset with Process Mining discovery techniques. Findings are further evaluated, for both horizontally and vertically distributed caregivers, by an IT expert from a Dutch hospital. The Resource, Event, Agent (REA) ontology-based ‘Insurance Model’ is used to identify the underlying economic factors behind the un-anonymized patients’ metadata share amongst caregivers. The model discovers the key economic agents, their prime interactions (from contract signing to the exchange of resources) for mutual economic gain/loss in the care metadata share landscape. Lastly, we explicate that the privacy concerns of patient’s metadata share emerge as ‘Materialized Privacy Claim’. The privacy claim only emerges if either the patient or any other potent (involved) authority finds an imbalance between the materialization and settlement of the patient’s exchanged resources. The ‘Materialized Privacy Claim’ illustrates concretely with money claims for unlawful disclosure of a patient’s personal information from caregivers and insurers.