A secure and efficiently searchable health information architecture.

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Computer Science
• Cybersecurity

Background:

• Patient-centric repositories are crucial for health information infrastructure.
• Centralized health data storage presents significant security vulnerabilities, risking total data loss from single intrusions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate the 'personal grid' as a novel health record storage architecture.
• To address the security risks associated with traditional, centralized patient data repositories.

Main Methods:

• A distributed storage model where each patient's health record is stored and encrypted individually.
• Utilizing parallel processing with numerous on-demand virtual servers for data retrieval.
• Estimating search times for large datasets (10 million records) using this architecture.

Main Results:

• The personal grid architecture significantly enhances security by decentralizing data storage and encryption.
• Search times for a 10 million record dataset range from 7 to 33 minutes with 500 parallel servers.
• The tradeoff involves sequential searching of individual records, impacting retrieval speed.

Conclusions:

• The personal grid offers a practical solution for secure health record storage, mitigating large-scale data breach risks.
• This architecture prioritizes security over search speed, which is acceptable for health information infrastructure needs.
• It presents a viable alternative to traditional databases, enhancing patient data protection.