epSOS Automatic Data Collector Home

This page tries to clarify the purpose of the eADC (epSOS Automatic Data Collector) on a National Contact Point Setup and also to raise some questions and provide some anwsers to the integration of the eADC in the OpenNCP Project.

You can find a brief resume of the specifications in this main page and also a sub-page, containing more specific questions and issues of the OpenNCP integration.

Introduction and Objective

In order to assess the success and performance of the epSOS large scale pilot, certain performance, scalability, and operational information is about to be collected from the NCP’s and the data that is exchanged by the means of epSOS. The current epSOS reference implementation already supports a limited collection of statistical data, such as the total number of epSOS consumer document passed through the NCP network, error statistics, and human actors.

However, individual participating nations, as well as the epSOS evaluation work package, wish to collect a more sophisticated and flexible collection of data points within epSOS and, if applicable, the affected national infrastructures. Such behaviour was not anticipated during the original specification phase of epSOS and is therefore not included and implemented in the current release. The principle of the Monitoring Manager was the extraction of anonymous audit trail data and its presentation in a dedicated graphical user interface (GUI).

epSOS Automatic Data Collection (eADC)

The epSOS Automatic Data Collection is designed in order to facilitate:

• The automatic, unsupervised information gathering and data extraction from every NCP transaction or consumer document that passes the NCP;
• Persistent storage of the resulting data sets in a RDBMS, available within each NCP;
• The flexible definition of extraction rules and their specific application onto transactions or consumer documents;

Security Considerations

The eADC is considered to gather, store, and process highly sensitive information. The following sub-section may serve as a functionality and process description for security and data protection assignees within your organisation. Please note that security and data protection assignees may be required to review this section before this common component may be used within your organisation.

Scope and Extend Data Disclosure

The eADC is designed to flexibly extract any information that is contained in any epSOS transaction and ist enclosed consumer documents. As such, the eADC potentially may have access to all information that is transported between NCP’s, creating a piece of software that may be subject to a full disclosure of sensitive personal medical information.

Limitation of Use to Specific Circumstances

The eADC may only be used for enabling the designated evaluation task force to fulfill its assigned task as agreed by the epSOS decision bodies and in full compliance to the epSOS FWA and the individual regulatory setting at the point of operation.
Furthermore, the eADC may only be used after the prior authorization of the affected data protection assignees of the organization that is operating the NCP. It may also be necessary to document a prior authorization of the affected data subject (patient) under certain circumstances or regulatory settings, depending on your specific configuration and extent of the actual data extraction and collection.

Data Economy, Avoidance, and Minimisation

The eADC is potentially collecting and storing a redundant data set (copy of medical information) in relation to its individual configuration. Without manual intervention, the eADC is potentially storing the collected data sets for an indefinite period of time.

Information Security

The eADC result data sets and persistent data storage facilities within the RDBMS MUST be adequately protected from unauthorised access. The configuration and extraction rules MUST be adequately integrity protected.

References

• D3.10.1 - eADC Specifications - v0.1
• WP1.2 Annex 3 Automatic data extraction v3

Attachments