An Electronic Health Record Content Protection System Using SmartCard and PMR

In order to comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Healthcare IT managers are faced with growing need to protect access and use of patient's private information and to maintain its access-trail. Recent reports [2, 12, and 14] show that deployed medical records administrative systems are failing to protect patient's electronic health records (EHR). Major deficiencies of EHR management system used today are inconsistencies and interoperability in security systems. This paper presents a patient-centric content protection system that is based on temper-resistant hardware and widely adopted security protocols for identification, EHR encryption, and communication. High availability and interoperability of EHR content protection system is achieved with the use of a specially designed device called Personalized Media Recordertrade (PMR).