On Tue, 08 Oct 1996 10:40:15 +0100, you wrote:
>IBM has joined up with a number of other firms to develop encryption
>products with `key recovery' so that they will be exportable. It makes
>the front page of www.ibm.com. The idea appears to be that by combining
>the market muscle of Apple, Atalla, DEC, Bull, Hewlett-Packard, IBM,
>NCR, RSA, Sun, TIS and UPS, with the regulatory muscle of the NATO
>governments they can force solutions acceptable to the US intelligence
>community on everybody else in the world.
>
>IBM's view on health care computing is:
>
>o Internet Health Care
>
> With an Internet-based health care system, patient records can be
> stored in a central location and accessed immediately by all properly
> authorized personnel required in the various processes. The
> information may be used by a primary care physician, by medical
> specialists, in the hospital and pharmacy and by the insurance
> company. Cryptographic functions, such as confidentiality, integrity,
> and authentication, are necessary and are invoked by the application,
> transparent to the users. Smart cards could also be incorporated, as a
> method of transporting patient medical records.
>
> (source: www.ibm.com/Security/crypto/html/wp_sc3.html)
>
>The assumption that health records must be centralised may come naturally
>to a mainframe vendor, but it doesn't exactly give me a warm feeling!
Lets give them the benefit of the doubt - perhaps that's just their
unfortunate wording. Each hospital's information system could be
viewed as a "central" repository of the information they hold on
patients they have treated. (ie small c not capital C)
From that perspective, the total patient record is distributed across
many healthcare "central" systems. The Web provides a basis for
accessing and integrating such information, and their logic then
sounds quite reasonable.
I agree with you, however, that the idea of a Centralised patient
record is barmy for a whole load of reasons - for a start it would be
totally impractical and unmanageable, long before you get onto the
security/ confidentiality implications.
---
Rob Tweed
IM&T Consulting Ltd; Health Web Services Ltd;
M/Gateway Developments Ltd
http://www.hwsl.co.uk/mgw
Tel: (+44) 181 540 1325
Fax: (+44) 181 715 4337
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