The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to study the feasibility of a health technology platform to enable an individual to be the main facilitator for secure and private health information synchronization. The proposed technology is aimed at increasing the opportunities for an individual to interact with care providers, and consequently improves the individual?s awareness of his/her own health condition and the benefit of behavioral change towards a healthy lifestyle. By facilitating electronic health record exchange, the platfrom also creates a positive environmental impact by avoiding wasteful duplication of records, tests, and procedures; thus a reduction in the use of paper, x-ray film, toxic chemicals for x-ray film processing and gasoline from avoided medical visits. By targeting at the poly-chronic patients who account for 5% of the population, an estimated $12 billion can be saved on the healthcare cost for the society if the proposed technology can affect even just 1% of the poly-chronic patients to have a behavioral change towards a healthy lifestyle.
The proposed project addresses the needs for secure exchange, sharing, and consolidation of health information for meaningful use. The research objective is to conduct feasibility study of the proposed platform technology to enable a patient centered model. The technology is a practical privacy preserving secure computation suitable for private data exchange. One important objective is to regenerate cryptographic keys based on an individual?s personal data such biometrics or imprecise passphrase; thus a mechanism to assure the security and privacy of electronic health data exchange. The proposed feasibility study will first realize a tool for empowering an individual in a patient-centered model to engage in secure synchronization and consolidation of health information. It will then test interoperability support for secure health information exchange and consolidation under the common standards for Stage 2 Meaningful Use using sample EHRs commonly available in the public domain. Based on the result, the effectiveness of the proposed technology can be evaluated in terms of its effectiveness to improve patient engagement in health information exchange, and its potential to assist care providers in increasing care efficiency while addressing the security and privacy requirement of HIPAA.
The phase 1 SBIR is to investigate the feasibility of the SIPPA Health platform technology to address the problem of health record fragmentation. SIPPA (Secure Information Processing with Privacy Assurance) is a secure computation technology employed to develop a technology stack – referred to as SIPPA Health. SIPPA Health is designed to offer a transformative business model that enables health care in a patient-centered care model. SIPPA Health assures security and privacy protections for exchanging, consolidating, and synchronizing fragmented health records among providers and individuals through a patient-centered model. In addition to the traditional desktop patient web portal environment that relies on username/password/pin, SIPPA Health provides a platform that includes a mobile app that allows patients to control and secure their sensitive health information with strong cryptographic encryption without the burden of managing the complexity of secret keys --- made possible by SIPPA core technology to regenerate a secret key based on an individual’s biometrics such as voice. Furthermore, SIPPA Health seeks to empower a patient with a mobile solution to take ownership on updating and sharing health information with his/her care team. During the phase 1 SBIR, a hypothesis driven alpha test was designed and conducted to validate the feasibility of SIPPA Health for secure health information exchange and consolidation. Proof-of-concept prototype was also designed and developed to support the feasibility study. Specifically, the following products were enhanced and/or developed: ? a technology stack composed of web services for extracting human-readable health information from CCD/C-CDA R2 promoted for stage 2 Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Record (EHR), as well as CCD consolidation engine. ? SIPPA Health Android app as a tool for individual patients to securely and privately manage their digital health information, and to synchronize the health data in their electronic medical records maintained by their care providers. A video demo on the SIPPA Health android app is available upon request by sending an email to sippasolutions@gmail.com
