scope:

This Technical Specification defines a model for expressing functional and structural roles and populates it with a basic set of roles for international use in health applications. Roles are generally assigned to entities that are actors. This will focus on roles of persons (e.g. the roles of health professionals) and their roles in the context of the provision of care (e.g. subject of care).

Roles can be structural (e.g. licensed general practitioner, non-licensed transcriptionist) or functional (e.g. a provider who is a member of a therapeutic team, an attending physician, etc). Structural roles are relatively static, often lasting for many years. They deal with relationships between entities expressed at a level of complex concepts. Functional roles are bound to the realization of actions and are highly dynamic. They are normally expressed at a decomposed level of fine-grained concepts.

Roles addressed in this Technical Specification are not restricted to privilege management purposes, though privilege management is one of the applications of this Technical Specification as well as access control. This Technical Specification does not address specifications related to permissions. This Technical Specification treats the role and the permission as separate constructs. Further details regarding the relationship with permissions, policy and access control are provided in ISO 22600-1.