Improving patient safety, health data accuracy, and remote self-management of health through the establishment of a biometric-based global UHID

Healthcare systems globally continue to face challenges surrounding patient identification. Consequences of misidentification include incomplete and inaccurate electronic patient health records potentially jeopardizing patients\u27 safety, a significant amount of cases of medical fraud because of inadequate identification mechanisms, and difficulties affiliated with the value of remote health self-management application data being aggregated accurately into the user\u27s Electronic Health Record (EHR). We introduce a new technique of user identification in healthcare capable of establishing a global identifier. Our research has developed algorithms capable of establishing a Unique Health Identifier (UHID) based on the user\u27s fingerprint biometric, with the utilization of facial-recognition as a secondary validation step before health records can be accessed. Biometric captures are completed using standard smartphones and Web cameras in a touchless method. We present a series of experiments to demonstrate the formation of an accurate, consistent, and scalable UHID. We hope our solution will aid in the reduction of complexities associated with user misidentification in healthcare resulting in lowering costs, enhancing population health monitoring, and improving patient-safety

Bridging the technology gap in health care: Developing a model to better help those who help others

Over recent years, there has been a significant increase of integrated computing devices and systems within the healthcare sector, including computerized machines which can see deep within the human body to detect illnesses previously missed, help engage the patient, provide enhanced education, and access medical data not readily accessible before. However, as new technologies, medications, treatments, and procedures are being developed rapidly, clinicians are expected to incorporate this new information into their daily practices, apply this knowledge to their patients, track each patient’s individual health status and background, while communicating quickly with patients, hospitals, and other providers. Additionally, clinicians are expected to keep up with the latest published medical data in the hopes of increasing the accuracy of diagnoses and treatments to improve patient health outcomes. However, there is a “small” problem with this expectation, there is not enough hours in a day to accomplish all of these tasks. According to a report by the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, it would take at least 160 hours (or four 40-hour work weeks) of reading every single week just to keep up with new medical knowledge as it’s published, let alone applying the effort to consider its relevance or to implement it practically. This places false expectations on clinicians. While they may be an experienced doctor, they still require a process which delivers functional, meaningful, efficient, and user-friendly technology to their daily work environment. Therefore, it is important to develop a methodology to support and compliment the recent strategy of health care delivery and payments

Unique Medical Biometric Recognition Enforcement of Legitimate and Large-scale Authentication (UMBRELLA)

In the United States\u27 healthcare system, challenges surrounding patient identification, interoperability exchange of health records, and complexities in providing a robust security system capable of protecting patient identifiable information (PII) have been widely documented. Consequences include incomplete and inaccurate electronic patient health records, redundant expensive medical tests caused by the lack of interoperability between healthcare institutions, and a significant amount of cases of medical fraud because of inadequate identification mechanisms. To date, no proven solution has been established to offer consistent and accurate identification for users within America\u27s healthcare system. Past literature describes techniques of developing algorithms used to match duplicate patient records and merge into a single record, however results have not been met with high accuracy. Biometric identification research has been conducted extensively, however there have been no successful attempts to link a scalable National Patient Identifier (NPI) to a user’s biometric output. We introduce a new technique of user identification in healthcare. Our research has developed algorithms capable of establishing a Unique Health Identifier (UHID) based on the user’s fingerprint biometric, with the utilization of facial recognition as a secondary validation step before health records can be accessed. Biometric captures may be completed using standard smartphones and Web cameras in a touchless method. Patients and healthcare professionals no longer need remember complex passwords or worry about their login credentials being stolen as they authenticate using biometrics. Interoperability and security mechanisms are developed and configured to provide an end-to-end accurate national identification and health data exchange. We call our solution UMBRELLA or Unique Medical Biometric Recognition Enforcement of Legitimate and Large-scale Authentication. We present a series of experiments to demonstrate the formation of an accurate and consistent UHID. We reveal the scalability and security of our identification solution through our large-scale distributed network and use a developed use case to illustrate the functionality and accuracy of our research. We expect the UMBRELLA solution to dramatically reduce the complexities associated with user misidentification in healthcare and enhance the interoperability and security mechanisms affiliated with health data exchange, resulting in lowering healthcare costs, enhancing population health monitoring, and improving patient-safety

Impact of NoFPGA IP router architecture on link bandwidth

In today\u27s world of advanced technology numerous applications are computationally intensive. This created an opportunity for the development of new System-on-Chip (SoC) design techniques to allow easy IP cores (Intellectual Property cores) re-use and integration under time-to-market pressure. A wide range of these newly emerging design platforms is now drifting towards highly integrated System-on-Chip designs with many on-chip processing resources like processors, DSPs, and memories. Using this technique, designers can build System-on-Chip (SoC) by integrating dozens of IP cores. As the number of IP cores integrated on a chip increases, the on-chip communication and physical interconnections become a bottleneck. New System-on-Chip (SoC) design techniques are necessary to address the communication requirements for future SoC. New communication architecture, the NoFPGA (Network-on-FPGA), for future SoFPGA (System-on-FPGA) has been presented. The paper details the architecture of a NoFPGA router. The interconnecting issues in SoFGPA design methodology built in a single FPGA device are addressed. Mainly, the performance analysis of the IPRouter of both Torus and Mesh topologies is addressed. © 2008 IEEE

Implications of modified waterfall model to the roles and education of health IT professionals

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are believed to have the potential to enhance efficiency and provide better health care. However, the benefits could be easily compromised if EHRs are not used appropriately. This paper applies a modified waterfall life cycle model to evaluate the roles of health IT professionals in the adoption and management of EHRs. We then present our development of a Masters\u27 program in Medical Informatics for the education of health IT professionals. We conclude that health IT professionals serve key roles in addressing the problems and concerns and help fulfill envision of EHRs. © 2012 IEEE

SAMSON: Secure Access for Medical Smart cards Over Networks

This paper presents several smart card security extensions to the FIPS 201 PIV standard of security and authentication of mobile health. Our contributions are designed to better protect the patient\u27s data and to increase the functionality and interoperability of smart cards in health care. Our solution, called SAMSON, consists of two types of smart cards. The first, a security card, is issued to all personnel within any medical organization, while the second, the medical card, is issued to patients and used to securely store and retrieve health care information. These smart cards are being tested within a 14 hospital federated consortium in Michigan\u27s Upper Peninsula. © 2010 IEEE

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

Detection of a weak conjunction of unstable predicates in dynamic systems

A weak conjunctive predicate is a conjunction of local predicates that is evaluated under the Possibly modality. In this study, we have proposed a distributed on-line algorithm for detecting weak conjunctions of unstable predicates in dynamic systems. In the algorithm, a virtual network of a logical ring combined with computation trees is dynamically maintained using local variables to keep track of causality relationships between distributed events. The differential technique is exploited to minimize the size of detection related information. During the execution of the distributed computation, each process maintains a vector containing potential solutions. Detection will be announced when the global predicate is verified. This algorithm does not require extra messages except those for process termination. The detection of a solution may not be announced until the termination of the underlying distributed computation in the case where a process never communicates with others. At each process, storage need is proportional to the number of processes in the system. This demand will increase in some extreme cases, although they are very rare in practice

Hands-on exercises for IT security education

© 2015 ACM. We have developed a collection of instructional hands-on lab assignments that can be used to help teach security courses or courses with a security component in information technology (IT). Our labs cover a wide spectrum of principles, ideas and technologies along with well-developed open source tools. Lab descriptions are publicly accessible from our web page. All of the labs have been tested in a virtual environment and utilized in our security courses. Feedback from the students has been positive. In this paper, we will present the lab design, topics covered in our labs, lab environments and student evaluation results. We will share our experience in transferring advanced technology to IT security education and lessons learned from this practice

Using VMware VCenter lab manager in undergraduate education for system administration and network security

We have developed and managed a virtual laboratory environment by deploying the VMware vCenter Lab Manager and the VMware vSphere vCenter on a load-balanced cluster of eight ESX 3.5 servers and a storage area network of 10.8 Tera bytes. This system has been in use to conduct hands- on laboratory experiments in undergraduate education for computer security and system administration. Lab Manager provides remote access through the Internet using a common Web browser, such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The way in which the Lab Manager manages and controls virtual machines and networking components provides additional convenience for instructors to implement laboratory exercises and for students to finish their experiments. In this article, we present the design of the system, introduce some of the features of the virtual environment, and discuss the experiences we have gained from developing and using this system. Compared with other existing virtualization platforms, Lab Manager provides more useful features and additional flexibility for the use in the education for in- formation technology (IT), although there is still room to improve. Copyright 2010 ACM