Title: Design of an efficient mobile health system for achieving HIPAA privacy-security regulations

Authors: Sangram Ray; G.P. Biswas

Addresses: Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, Dhanbad 826004, Jharkhand, India ' Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, Dhanbad 826004, Jharkhand, India

Abstract: A mobile phone based solution to fulfil the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations is proposed in this paper for providing health services to patients especially residing in remote areas. Initially, patients and doctors register to a Medical Centre Server (MCS), which stores all doctors' information and patients' Protected Health Information (PHI). During treatment, a patient consults a medical expert system and its output is uploaded to MCS for specialised doctor's information and accordingly the patient contacts the doctors for treatment. The doctor retrieves the diagnostic results from MCS, gives advices to patient and finally generates the patient's PHI and uploads it to MCS. A copy of PHI is then sent to the patient by MCS. The proposed scheme, which also includes the treatments in emergency situation and foreign countries, is implementable using existing infrastructure and supports treatment in shortest possible time without patient's trip to doctors.

Keywords: e-health security; HIPAA; medical centre servers; protected health information; secure access gateway; SMS; short message service; mobile health systems; m-health; electronic healthcare; privacy regulations; security regulations; mobile phones; cell phones; healthcare services; remote areas; medical expert systems; remote healthcare.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2014.063056

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2014 Vol.7 No.4, pp.378 - 387

Received: 02 Apr 2012
Accepted: 08 Jul 2012
Published online: 31 Oct 2014 *

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