Secure healthcare information exchange for local domains

The National Institutes of Health, along with other healthcare related agencies, continue to define the importance of exchanging medical data between hospitals and other healthcare providers. However, issues within the medical field such as interoperability, scalability and security continue to plague electronic exchange of information within the healthcare sector. In this paper we present an approach, called Secure Healthcare Information Exchange for Local Domains (SHIELD), which defines strategic components within an architecture that solves the problem of interoperability, scalability and security. Our solution integrates biometric and smart card technology that permits each hospital to exchange medical data with other hospitals within the trusted federation, without sacrificing the ability for individual hospitals to maintain their own policy enforcement. This research is currently being implemented within one Regional Center and fourteen hospitals within the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States.