I'm always looking for better ways to secure patient/research subject data, because conformance to HIPAA Privacy and Security and the Common Rule is very important to my institution (as it is to every academic health center and pharma). This task is made especially difficult by the need to integrate multiple applications containing sensitive information, stored in many different formats and often only accessible through some application-proprietary interface.
Dr. Steve Beller, an entrepreneurial sort of health IT guru who has written very insightfully about the current state of the US healthcare system in the Wellness Wiki, has introduced a technology framework that shows great promise. I'm still studying this, but I'll be writing more about it soon. The most interesting aspect to me is called CP Split™ Technology.
Node-to node with universal translation is an application that manages the transfer of information between two computers in an asynchronous manner, requiring a node on one computer to be a publisher (sender) of information, and one or more nodes on other computer(s) to act as subscriber(s). This is an application to application information transfer process requiring each computer involved to support an operating system and a connection to the Internet via broadband or dial-up service. At one end of the connection, the publisher node must authorize the information transfer by authenticating that the subscriber node is allowed to receive the information. At the other end of the connection, each subscriber node must allow the publisher to deposit the information into a directory as a file with a common extension. Universal translation requires that the publisher be notified by each subscriber how the information, when received, will be formatted by the subscriber for presentation as a report, which enables the publisher to transform the information as necessary, so it can be used by different subscribers (e.g., performing language translations and data set modifications).
Publish/subscribe interfaces go back a long way, of course, but I know of no attempts to apply them to sensitive healthcare information in a regulatory-compliant manner.
Steve is looking for vendor partners to help propagate the technology. I'm out of the entrepreneurial game for the time being, but I must admit that from what I have seen so far I am sorely tempted to jump back in. I'll be writing more about this soon.
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