Patient Consent Management API

The Patient Consent Management (PCM) API is one of the core components of the Consent2Share (C2S) application. The PCM provides APIs for patients to manage their electronic consents including consent creation, consent audit, consent eSignature, consent export, and patient provider list management. An electronic patient consent is a digital agreement created and electronically signed by the patient to do the following:

1. Select which sensitive categories of health information he or she wishes to share
2. Select the purposes for which the medical information may be used
3. Identify the provider from whom the information can be disclosed
4. Identify the provider to whom the information can be disclosed
5. Record the date when the consent goes into effect
6. Identify the expiration date of the consent

The value sets, downloaded from VSAC, are a set of concept codes mapped to various sensitive categories that are intended for use by organizations exchanging personally identifiable protected health information to perform data segmentation based on the patient’s privacy preferences in his or her consent.

Build

Prerequisites

• Oracle Java JDK 8 with Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy
• Docker Engine (for building a Docker image from the project)

Commands

This is a Maven project and requires Apache Maven 3.3.3 or greater to build it. It is recommended to use the Maven Wrapper scripts provided with this project. Maven Wrapper requires an internet connection to download Maven and project dependencies for the very first build.

To build the project, navigate to the folder that contains pom.xml file using the terminal/command line.

• To build a JAR:
  • For Windows, run mvnw.cmd clean install
  • For *nix systems, run mvnw clean install
• To build a Docker Image (this will create an image with bhits/pcm:latest tag):
  • For Windows, run mvnw.cmd clean package docker:build
  • For *nix systems, run mvnw clean package docker:build

Run

Prerequisites

This API uses MySQL for persistence and Flyway for database migration. It requires having a database user account with Object and DDL Rights to a schema with default name pcm. Please see Configure section for details of configuring the data source. This API also uses ClamAV anti-virus engine to scan clinical documents. It can be setup by using docker-clamavd and also can be installed on server. Please see Installing ClamAV for details of configuring the data source.

Commands

This is a Spring Boot project and serves the API via an embedded Tomcat instance. Therefore, there is no need for a separate application server to run this service.

• Run as a JAR file: java -jar pcm-x.x.x-SNAPSHOT.jar <additional program arguments>
• Run as a Docker Container: docker run -d bhits/pcm:latest <additional program arguments>

NOTE: In order for this API to fully function as a microservice in C2S Application, it is also required to setup the dependency microservices and support level infrastructure. Please refer to the C2S Deployment Guide for instructions to setup the C2S infrastructure.

Configure

This API utilizes Configuration Server which is based on Spring Cloud Config to manage externalized configuration, which is stored in a Configuration Data Git Repository. We provide a Default Configuration Data Git Repository.

This API can run with the default configuration, which is targeted for a local development environment. Default configuration data is from three places: bootstrap.yml, application.yml, and the data which Configuration Server reads from Configuration Data Git Repository. Both bootstrap.yml and application.yml files are located in the resources folder of this source code.

We recommend overriding the configuration as needed in the Configuration Data Git Repository, which is used by the Configuration Server.

Also, please refer to Spring Cloud Config Documentation to see how the config server works, Spring Boot Externalized Configuration documentation to see how Spring Boot applies the order to load the properties, and Spring Boot Common Properties documentation to see the common properties used by Spring Boot.

Other Ways to Override Configuration

Override a Configuration Using Program Arguments While Running as a JAR:

• java -jar pcm-x.x.x-SNAPSHOT.jar --server.port=80 --spring.datasource.password=strongpassword

Override a Configuration Using Program Arguments While Running as a Docker Container:

• docker run -d bhits/pcm:latest --server.port=80 --spring.datasource.password=strongpassword

• In a docker-compose.yml, this can be provided as:

version: '2'
services:
...
  pcm.c2s.com:
    image: "bhits/pcm:latest"
    command: ["--server.port=80","--spring.datasource.password=strongpassword"]
...

NOTE: Please note that these additional arguments will be appended to the default ENTRYPOINT specified in the Dockerfile unless the ENTRYPOINT is overridden.

Enable SSL

For simplicity in development and testing environments, SSL is NOT enabled by default configuration. SSL can easily be enabled following the examples below:

Enable SSL While Running as a JAR

• java -jar pcm-x.x.x-SNAPSHOT.jar --spring.profiles.active=ssl --server.ssl.key-store=/path/to/ssl_keystore.keystore --server.ssl.key-store-password=strongkeystorepassword

Enable SSL While Running as a Docker Container

• docker run -d -v "/path/on/dockerhost/ssl_keystore.keystore:/path/to/ssl_keystore.keystore" bhits/pcm:latest --spring.profiles.active=ssl --server.ssl.key-store=/path/to/ssl_keystore.keystore --server.ssl.key-store-password=strongkeystorepassword
• In a docker-compose.yml, this can be provided as:

version: '2'
services:
...
  pcm.c2s.com:
    image: "bhits/pcm:latest"
    command: ["--spring.profiles.active=ssl","--server.ssl.key-store=/path/to/ssl_keystore.keystore", "--server.ssl.key-store-password=strongkeystorepassword"]
    volumes:
      - /path/on/dockerhost/ssl_keystore.keystore:/path/to/ssl_keystore.keystore
...

NOTE: As seen in the examples above, /path/to/ssl_keystore.keystore is made available to the container via a volume mounted from the Docker host running this container.

Override Java CA Certificates Store In Docker Environment

Java has a default CA Certificates Store that allows it to trust well-known certificate authorities. For development and testing purposes, one might want to trust additional self-signed certificates. In order to override the default Java CA Certificates Store in a Docker container, one can mount a custom cacerts file over the default one in the Docker image as follows docker run -d -v "/path/on/dockerhost/to/custom/cacerts:/etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts" bhits/pcm:latest

NOTE: The cacerts references given in the volume mapping above are files, not directories.

Notes

Currently, the Value Set Service (VSS) domain and APIs are a part of PCM API. The VSS is planned to be refactored as a separate Consent2Share microservice in the future.

Contact

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please see Consent2Share project site.

Report Issues

Please use GitHub Issues page to report issues.