Application of Digital Signature Standard in Home Healthcare Transactions

The proposed Phase I project will develop software tools for embedding digital signatures in compliance with the proposed Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standard for healthcare and demonstrate the feasibility of using digital signatures along with remote database look-up procedures to automate existing procedures, which are time and paper intensive, in a home healthcare service. The results of the project will produce a working software prototype module of the Digital Signature Standard (DSS), which can be embedded in other software products used for EDI, and a feasibility study for deployment of a prototype system utilizing a Remot Database Access (RDA) mechanism for healthcare transactions. The results will provide the foundation for creating a "middleware" product to link the home healthcare transactions to a large Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) through an existing EDI translator owned by the HMO. The Phase II project project will comply with the ANSI X12 Healthcare specification, which is currently in development.