SP-CIP: A secure and privacy aware patient centric information portal

Abstract

There is an urgent need for the establishment of patient-centric and quality aware solutions in today's healthcare environment. To this effect, Clinical Information Systems (CIP) play a powerful role to significantly influence the quality and efficiency of health care delivery systems. However, most of the current functional CIP are static [1] in design and typically represent and cater to only a single healthcare entity. This leads to an inaccurate and stale view of the patient status both in the care of the patient and also in the delivery of essential healthcare services. Moreover, it also delays patient care and leads to inconveniences in patient billing and the overall usability of the system. Added to this there is an oversight of security and privacy policies and procedures in the implementation of such systems. Thus, with the current pervasive nature of technology in such healthcare organizations, this creates a critical risk of such information systems to fall prey to data leaks and/or abuse during the access, storage and transmission of such systems. To address the above key barriers towards the development of the effective CIP this research proposes SP-CIP: a standardized, security and privacy aware patient portal system. By utilizing the proposed standard design framework, the features of patient portals can evolve from static to a more dynamic design, which is inclusive of a user-centric, secure and proactive approach for patient care. These features also provide flexibility to include a de-centralized mechanism to access, store and transmit healthcare information over cloud based systems, and aims to establish the expectations of an effective patient portal, leading to improved cost and quality of patient care in today's healthcare systems. The pilot evaluation of the proposed systems at a high-end federal government Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 6 health care organization (> 500 bed capacity) and its associated partner organizations and clinical practices further demonstrates the strengths of proposed system. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.