Health Theater

Security theater has been defined as an effort to provide the feeling of security instead of the reality. The concept of security theater has been discussed in both the popular press and academic literature, but has not yet entered health law. This project suggests that a parallel category of health theater picks out a set ofpractices in medical screening and health care delivery that provide a mere simulacrum ofprotection against medical risk, rather than providing genuine medical benefit. Part I summarizes some of the distinctive advantages and disadvantages of health and security theater. Like security theater, health theater frequently comes at high cost; employs high technology in place of individualized, personal assessment; and ignores differences between individuals. And, as with security theater, health theater also amplifies general anxiety and ignores the costs offalse positives. Part II discusses some of the advantages of health theater, including its capacity to make patients feel respected and to produce psychological security. Part III discusses three potential alternatives to health theater: hightouch medicine, precise targeting of diagnostic efforts, and elimination of threats at their source. Last, Part IV considers how law could support alternatives to health theater, focusing on changes in the financing of health care, changes in liability regimes, and increased investment in public health

Enhancing Privacy and Authorization Control Scalability in the Grid through Ontologies

© 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The use of data Grids for sharing relevant data has proven to be successful in many research disciplines. However, the use of these environments when personal data are involved (such as in health) is reduced due to its lack of trust. There are many approaches that provide encrypted storages and key shares to prevent the access from unauthorized users. However, these approaches are additional layers that should be managed along with the authorization policies. We present in this paper a privacy-enhancing technique that uses encryption and relates to the structure of the data and their organizations, providing a natural way to propagate authorization and also a framework that fits with many use cases. The paper describes the architecture and processes, and also shows results obtained in a medical imaging platform.Manuscript received November 19, 2007; revised July 27, 2008. First published August 4,2008; cur-rent version published January 4,2009. This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science to develop the project "ngGrid-New Generation Components for the Efficient Exploitation of eScience Infrastructures," under Grant TIN2006-12860 and in part by the Structural Funds of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).Blanquer Espert, I.; Hernández García, V.; Segrelles Quilis, JD.; Torres Serrano, E. (2009). Enhancing Privacy and Authorization Control Scalability in the Grid through Ontologies. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine. 13(1):16-24. https://doi.org/10.1109/TITB.2008.2003369S162413