Context: Health information sharing improves the performance of patient self-management when dealing with challenging chronic disease care. Cloud computing has the potential to provide a more imaginative long-term solution compared with traditional systems. However, there is a need for identifying a suitable way to share patient health information via cloud. Objectives: This study aims to identify what health information is suitable and valuable to share from a type 2 diabetes patient when multiple stakeholders are involved for different purposes, and find out a promising and achievable cloud based solution which enables patients to share the health information what and where they want to share. Methods: To get a clear and deep understanding on the subject area, and identify available knowledge and information on relevant researches, a literature review was performed. And then, a prototype on the case of type 2 diabetes is implemented to prove the feasibility of the proposed solution after analyzing the knowledge acquired from literatures. Finally, professionals and patient were interviewed to evaluate and improve the proposed solution. Results: A hybrid cloud solution is identified as a suitable way to enable patient to share health information for promoting the treatment of chronic disease. Conclusions: Based on the research with type 2 diabetes, it was concluded that most records in daily life such as physiologic measurements, non-physiologic measurements and lifestyle are valuable for the treatment of chronic diseases. It was also concluded that hybrid cloud is suitable and achievable for sharing patient-recorded health information among trusted and semi-trusted stakeholders. Moreover, anonymous and patient opt-in consent model are suitable when sharing to semi-trusted stakeholders.

Medical researchers utilize data sharing agreements (DSA) to communicate privacy policies that govern the treatment of data in their collaboration. Expression of privacy policies in DSAs have been achieved through the use of natural and policy languages. However, ambiguity in natural language and rigidness in policy languages make them unsuitable for use in collaborative medical research. Our goal is to develop an unambiguous and flexible form of expression of privacy policies for collaborative medical research. In this thesis, we developed a DSA Privacy Ontology to express privacy policies in medical research. Our ontology was designed with hierarchy structure, lightweight in expressivity, closed world assumption in interpretation, and the reuse of other ontologies. The design allows our ontology to be flexible and extensible. Being flexible allows our ontology to express different types of privacy policies. Being extensible allows our ontology to be mapped to other linkable ontologies without the need to change our existing ontology. We demonstrate that our ontology is capable of supporting the DSA in a collaborative research data sharing scenario through providing the appropriate vocabulary and structure to log privacy events in a linked data based audit log. Furthermore, through querying the audit log, we can answer privacy competency questions relevant to medical researchers. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)