A patient-identity security mechanism for electronic medical records during transit and at rest

This paper proposes a patient-identity security mechanism, including an identity cipher/decipher and a user-authentication protocol, to ensure the confidentiality and authentication of patients' electronic medical records (EMRs) during transit and at rest. To support the confidentiality of an EMR, the identity cipher/decipher uses a data-hiding function and three logical-based functions to encrypt/decrypt a patient's identifying data and medical details in an EMR. The ciphertext of the patient's identifying data is patient-EMR related, whereas that of medical details is healthcare agent-EMR related. To support the authentication of an EMR, the user-authentication protocol based on a public key infrastructure uses certificates and dynamic cookies for verification/identification. The identity cipher has been simulated using C programming language running on a 1500 MHz Pentium PC with 512 MB of RAM. The experimental results show that healthcare agents can install large amounts of patients' encrypted EMRs in healthcare databases efficiently. In addition, separately storing the keys in a user's token and an EMR database for decryption increases the safety of patients' EMRs. For each user-authentication trail, the use of certificates and dynamic cookies for verification/identification ensures that only authorized users can obtain access to the EMR, and anyone involved cannot make false claims on the transmission made.