Privacy Preserving Portable Health Record (P^3HR)

Personal health records (PHRs) offer significant potential to stimulate transformational changes in health care delivery and self-care by patients. There is a gap between today´s personal health records (PHRs) and what patients say they want and need from this electronic tool for managing their health information. Current barriers to PHR adoption among patients include cost, concerns that information is not protected or private, inconvenience, design shortcomings, and the inability to share information across organizations. We propose a novel architecture to bridge the gap based on privacy preserving portable health record (P³HR), a device that incorporates a smart card into a USB flash drive which provides encrypted flash memory for secure mobile data storage. The salient features of the proposed privacy preserving portable health record (P³HR) include: strong multifactor authentication using biometrics, public key infrastructure to verify the credentials of the applicants, SSL based authentication protocol suite for authorization and secure online updates, local backup to store patient data which ensures that the patient will have access to data in case of P³HR theft, lost device, hardware failure, software failure or a computer virus.