Assuring the privacy and security of transmitting sensitive electronic health information

AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2009 Nov 14:2009:516-20.

Abstract

The interchange of electronic health records between healthcare providers and public health organizations has become an increasingly desirable tool in reducing healthcare costs, improving healthcare quality, and protecting population health. Assuring privacy and security in nationwide sharing of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in an environment such as GRID has become a top challenge and concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) and The Science Application International Corporation (SAIC) have jointly conducted a proof of concept study to find and build a common secure and reliable messaging platform (the SRM Platform) to handle this challenge. The SRM Platform is built on the open standards of OASIS, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web-services standards, and Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) specifications to provide the secure transport of sensitive EHR or electronic medical records (EMR). Transmitted data may be in any digital form including text, data, and binary files, such as images. This paper identifies the business use cases, architecture, test results, and new connectivity options for disparate health networks among PHIN, NHIN, Grid, and others.

MeSH terms

  • Computer Security / standards*
  • Confidentiality / standards*
  • Electronic Health Records / standards*
  • Internet* / standards
  • Software* / standards