Initial Experiences of Accessing Patient Confidential Data over the Internet using a Public Key Infrastructure

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Chadwick, D.W., Harvey, S., New, J. & Young, A.J. (2001). Initial Experiences of Accessing Patient Confidential Data over the Internet using a Public Key Infrastructure. In Jerman-Blazic, B., Schneider, W.S. & Klobucar, T. (eds)(2001), Advanced Security Technologies in Networking. pp201-209. Amsterdam: IOS Press. ISBN: 1 58603 156 2.

Abstract

A project to enable health care professionals (GPs, practice nurses and diabetes nurse specialists) to access, via the Internet, confidential patient data held on a secondary care (hospital) diabetes information system, has been implemented. We describe the application that we chose to distribute (a diabetes register); the security mechanisms we used to protect the data (a public key infrastructure with strong encryption and digitally signed messages, plus a firewall); the reasons for the implementation decisions we made; the validation testing that we performed and the preliminary results of the pilot implementation.

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