Lead Institution: Vanderbilt University

Project Leader: Janos Sztipanovits

Research Progress

• Abstract
  The Generative Integration Tool (GIT) enables the translation of policy models into many different programming and rule languages (like FORMULA, Drools DRL or ILOG BRL/IRL) to enable the integration of formal and validated policies into information flow control of production HIE systems.

• Focus of the research/Market need for this project
  The operation of HIEs requires active enforcement of privacy policies among health care organizations. GIT provides the technology for integrating the policies in commercial health IT systems.

• Project Aims/Goals
  Research and Develop means to translate the policy models and use case models into many different programming languages in support for using such models for verification, validation and privacy enforcement in health information exchange systems.

• Key Conclusions/Significant Findings/Milestones reached/Deliverables
  We have researched and developed the Generative Integration Tool (GIT) to support translation of models into executable code. The GIT leverages research in the fields of semantic anchoring and formal languages. The key concept of the GIT is to use code templates with minimal supporting code to provide the semantic anchors for the models. The language specific code templates and semantic templates are created with the syntax of the StringTemplate language and open source library. The GIT works on the internal data-model of the Web-based PATRN toolkit that is based on the policy interchange format defined for PATRN. The GIT is used to generate validation and verification code from the models created by the UCAME tool.

  

  Figure 4. A policy model and FORMULA code generated using GIT.

• Materials Available for Other Investigators/interested parties
  The Generative Integration Tool (GIT) prototype is available as part of the https://policyforge.org/ included in the project add-on tools for policy authoring and use case modeling with documentation in the policyforge help project.

• Market entry strategies
  PolicyForge.org is an open collaboration website that is similar to the established open source community sites such as SourceForge or GitHUB, but it is specifically tailored for policy formalization. We use the PolicyForge.org website to provide access to the prototype Generative Integration Tool (GIT) included in the Policy Authoring Environment and Use Case Modeling Environment. For more information see the Market Entry Strategy for the Policy Authoring Environment.

Bibliography
PolicyForge: A Collaborative Environment for Formalizing Privacy Policies in Health Care
Andras Nadas, Laszlo Juracz, Janos Sztipanovits, Mark E. Frisse, and Ann J. Olsen
Software Engineering in Health Care (SEHC), 5th International Workshop, May 2013

A Model-Integrated Authoring Environment for Privacy Policies
Andras Nadas, Tihamer Levendovszky, Ethan K. Jackson, Istvan Madari, and Janos Sztipanovits
Science of Computer Programming, January 2013

Modeling Privacy Aware Health Information Exchange Systems
Andras Nadas, Mark E. Frisse, and Janos Sztipanovits
The 1st International Workshop on Engineering EHR Solutions (WEES) at Amsterdam Privacy Conference 2012, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; October 2012