Computer Science Research

Seamless and Trusted Health Information System(MIS Project)

Medical Information Systems (MIS) help medical practice and health care significantly. Security and dependability are two increasingly important factors for MIS nowadays. In one hand, people would be willing to step into the MIS age only when their privacy and integrity can be protected and guaranteed with MIS systems. On the other hand, only secure and reliable MIS systems would provide safe and solid medical and health care service to people. In 2004, President Bush outlined a plan to have electronic health records (EHR) for most Americans within ten years. This is a clear indication of the importance of MIS to medical practice and health care services. The greatest concern people have with MIS is the security, privacy, and confidentiality of their personal health information (Goldschmidt 2005). As a result, security of the MIS is very critical for those digitized health services. Dependability is also very important for MIS. For example, it could be potentially fatal if a patient's records fail to be loaded due to system failures and they are unavailable in the event of life-threatening emergency. Therefore, the MIS has very high requirements for reliability. Another concern is that different medical institutions across nations are in the urgent need to exchange and share the patient data for both clinical practice and medical research. However, current separate and heterogeneous medical information systems prevent them from doing so. Thus, it is necessary to integrate the existing medical information systems in an efficient and scalable way.

For those purposes, we have implemented our dependability and security mechanisms into a real MIS, in collaboration with VA (Veterans Affairs) Hospitals and DoD (Department of Defense). The key management services and security modules are integrated into this MIS system without modifying the existing CPRS client, VISTA application server, and databases.
(see IUPUI News: IUPUI computer scientists develop revolutionary medical information system at http://www.iupui.edu/news/releases/060222_med_info_system.htm, (2006))

The long term goal of this project is, in collaboration with VA, DoD, Indiana University School of Medicine, to develop and deploy a national-wide seamless and trusted health information system which will

1. be highly secure and dependable
2. use the advanced security, dependability, and grid computing technology invented at the TEGO (Trusted Electronics and Grid Obfuscation) center in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at IUPUI
3. implement seamless integration and secure data exchange and sharing among the existing heterogeneous health information systems and different health organizations across the nation
4. work even without Master Patient Index
5. offer telemedicine and some other interesting services
6. benefit people and society.

Reference: Goldschmidt, P. G.: HIT and MIS: implications of health information technology and medical information systems. Comm. of ACM, 48(10) (2005) 68-74.

Project Presented By

Zou, Xukai

Position:	Associate Professor
Mail:
Phone:	317-278-8576
Url:	http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~xkzou/

Education Details

Research Interests

Assistant Professor Dr. Xukai Zou received his Ph.D. from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and M.S. and B.S. degrees from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) and Zhengzhou University (China) respectively, all in Computer Science. His research is in Applied Cryptography, Communication Networks and Security, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and Grid Computing. He has published three books and over twenty peer-reviewed articles in security-related topics. Dr. Zou is a recipient of the U.S. NSF Cyber Trust Awards and the co-author of the two recent Books "Secure Group Communication over Data Networks" (Springer, 2004) and "Trust and Security in Collaborative Computing" (World Scientific, 2006). Dr. Zou is a Program Chair and a Program Committee Member for a number of international conferences and serves on the Editorial Board and as a reviewer for many international journals and conferences.