What is Selective Disclosure in FHIR Data Exchange?
Examples — FHIR Selective Disclosure - Polymonial
Summary
Polymonial provides technology that ensures only the information required for a user's specific role is visible when exchanging FHIR resources between healthcare systems. This achieves field-level access control without revealing the entire patient record, enhancing security and privacy.
Details
When using HL7 FHIR, the standard for healthcare data exchange, receiving systems often get the complete FHIR document when a resource (e.g., Patient, Observation) is exchanged. For instance, a pharmacist verifying a prescription might receive unnecessary information like mental-health diagnoses or full medical history. Polymonial addresses this by wrapping each FHIR resource at the issuer level. The system then uses role-based schemas—such as one for pharmacy validation or one for lab collection details—to ensure that only the fields clinically necessary for that specific consumer are decrypted and accessed. This means a community pharmacy can check only prescription validity, while a lab can access only sample handling details. In a large regional hospital exchanging thousands of resources daily with multiple partners (pharmacies, labs, GPs), this mechanism ensures that even if one integration partner is breached, the exposure is limited only to the specific 'slice' that partner had a clinical reason to see. This significantly enhances data privacy and security in modern healthcare interoperability environments.
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