SBIR Phase I: Secure Computation for Private Health Information Exchange and Consolidation under a Patient-Centered Model

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to study the feasibility of a health technology platform to enable an individual to be the main facilitator for secure and private health information synchronization. The proposed technology is aimed at increasing the opportunities for an individual to interact with care providers, and consequently improves the individual?s awareness of his/her own health condition and the benefit of behavioral change towards a healthy lifestyle. By facilitating electronic health record exchange, the platfrom also creates a positive environmental impact by avoiding wasteful duplication of records, tests, and procedures; thus a reduction in the use of paper, x-ray film, toxic chemicals for x-ray film processing and gasoline from avoided medical visits. By targeting at the poly-chronic patients who account for 5% of the population, an estimated $12 billion can be saved on the healthcare cost for the society if the proposed technology can affect even just 1% of the poly-chronic patients to have a behavioral change towards a healthy lifestyle. The proposed project addresses the needs for secure exchange, sharing, and consolidation of health information for meaningful use. The research objective is to conduct feasibility study of the proposed platform technology to enable a patient centered model. The technology is a practical privacy preserving secure computation suitable for private data exchange. One important objective is to regenerate cryptographic keys based on an individual?s personal data such biometrics or imprecise passphrase; thus a mechanism to assure the security and privacy of electronic health data exchange. The proposed feasibility study will first realize a tool for empowering an individual in a patient-centered model to engage in secure synchronization and consolidation of health information. It will then test interoperability support for secure health information exchange and consolidation under the common standards for Stage 2 Meaningful Use using sample EHRs commonly available in the public domain. Based on the result, the effectiveness of the proposed technology can be evaluated in terms of its effectiveness to improve patient engagement in health information exchange, and its potential to assist care providers in increasing care efficiency while addressing the security and privacy requirement of HIPAA.