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unequivocally relates it to the patient index informa-
tion stored in Index system.
To test this prototype, a Google Health account
is being used to create a test record. Using the Data
Exchange tool (Mount Tabor, 2010) the record is ex-
ported to a file. That file is uploaded to our Repository
via our Broker to test the solution. The inverse pro-
cess will be also tested.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Personal Health Records have recently appeared as a
solution that allows patients to keep track of their own
clinical history. With the increasing availability of
medical information in the Internet, citizens now have
access to a tremendous amount of data sources, which
provide information such as diseases symptoms, di-
agnostics, treatments, drugs, physicians, and many
others. This situation is leading to better informed
citizens, but with much more complex requirements
– health information gathering and privacy assurance
are two critical examples.
This paper presents a secure PHR repository that
combines the notion of a safe deposit with the ability
to securely share clinical data. This particular feature
enables the integration with external services upon
an explicit authorization by the patient. In this way,
much of the data that is uploaded in the repository
can come directly from EHR systems, which allevi-
ates the user from the burden of record updating. The
aggregation of all these contributions enables a com-
prehensive overview of the patient medical status and
relevant historic information. Moreover, patient’s per-
sonal registries can also be kept in this system.
To assure security requirements, the information
in transit is always ciphered. On storage operations,
the system uses the patient public key and on retrieval
it applies the public key of the requester. In the store
procedure a second entity, the Broker, will also cipher
the data before storing it in the repository. The only
component that can read the sandbox record is a vir-
tual card component (VHCS), but without access to
its content. Despite holding the repository credentials
and the private key of the patient to decipher the data,
the VHCS would need that the Brokeralso retrieve the
data from repository. The proposed solution provides
a search capability through an indexing service that
maintains links to metadata of all the PHR contribu-
tions, allowing a selective retrieve from the repository
whenever a query is executed.
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