A Novel QR Code-Based Solution for Secure Electronic Health Record Transfer in Venous Thromboembolism Home...

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Informatics
• Data Security
• Health Informatics

Background:

• Venous thromboembolism (VTE) necessitates extended anticoagulation and continuous monitoring post-discharge.
• Home rehabilitation systems using electronic health records (EHRs) offer monitoring but face data privacy and security challenges.
• Conventional data transfer methods for EHRs present technical and operational limitations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a secure QR code-based algorithm for transferring out-of-hospital health records.
• To ensure data security and user privacy in home rehabilitation management systems.

Main Methods:

• Developed a QR code security transmission algorithm utilizing Avro and byte pair encoding (BPE).
• Employed BPE for medical text tokenization, Avro for JSON serialization, and Gzip for compression.
• Integrated ChaCha20 and BLAKE3 for encryption and authentication.
• Evaluated compression efficiency using a benchmark dataset and comparative analyses.

Main Results:

• The BPE + Avro + Gzip algorithm achieved an average file size reduction to 1048 bytes (compression ratio of 6.67), 1.82 times more efficient than Gzip alone.
• BPE outperformed unigram tokenization for Chinese medical text (compression ratio 4.68 vs. 4.55).
• 84.7% of patients required scanning only one QR code, with an average scan time of 3.1 seconds.

Conclusions:

• The QR code algorithm effectively compresses, encrypts, and transmits medical data securely, authenticating users.
• The algorithm ensures the privacy and security of patient medical data during transfer.
• Delivered as a software development kit, the algorithm is designed for straightforward implementation and broad adoption.