HICCUPS: health information collaborative collection using privacy and security

  • Authors:
  • Andres D. Molina;Mastooreh Salajegheh;Kevin Fu

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the first ACM workshop on Security and privacy in medical and home-care systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

A recent national survey suggests that the HIPAA privacy rule has not only failed to preserve patient privacy adequately, but also has had a negative impact on clinical research. Our work suggests that researchers revisit the possibilities of homomorphic encryption and apply the techniques to secure aggregation of medical telemetry. A primary goal is to maintain the privacy of individual patient records while also allowing clinical researchers to have flexible access to aggregated information. We discuss the preliminary design of HICCUPS, a distributed system that uses homomorphic encryption to allow only the caregivers to have unrestricted access to patients' records and at the same time enable researchers to compute statistical values and aggregation functions across different patients and caregivers. In the context of processing medical telemetry, we advocate expressibility of aggregation functions more than fast computation as a primary metric of system quality.