HealthyDocs

The Challenge

The growth of the United States’ fragmented healthcare data ecosystem has significantly outpaced our ability to secure it. Security breaches and Electronic Health Record (EHR) outages have become commonplace in medical facilities across the United States, with more than 6,000 breaches reported since 2009. And as connected medical technologies and wearable device data are increasingly integrated into patient care and hospital workflows, the complexity of our already vulnerable system is only growing.

With this increase in connected devices, the need for secure interoperability becomes even more pertinent. Patient data remains fragmented across providers and a significant amount is held by companies outside of the certified health IT provider designation - resulting in both security and usability problems. In addition, clinicians and support staff are still responsible for manually logging data between devices, lab reports, and EHRs – an error prone and time-consuming task that results in mistakes in health records and significantly decreases patient care hours.

The Solution

To address these interwoven issues of data security, interoperability, and usability, Galois is developing HealthyDocs: a secure platform for integrating and managing data that reduces attack surfaces and the manual burden of data management while enabling clinicians and researchers to derive new insights and advance patient care, all without exposing sensitive healthcare data.

HealthyDocs combines recent advances in high-assurance parsing, data integration, and privacy-preserving analysis into a system built for healthcare. Secure parsing will prevent a broad class of exploits — including ransomware — while privacy enhancing technologies including secure multi-party computation (SMPC) and Differential Privacy protect patient data during storage, analysis, and while disclosing results. Finally, HealthyDocs tools and user interface (UI) are being designed alongside and for clinicians and non-technical users to enable real-world usability.

The Result

A secure, scalable solution poised to revolutionize healthcare data management.

The success of HealthyDocs will broaden accessibility and usability of healthcare data by establishing a new standard for secure, scalable, and easy-to-use data interoperability. It will relieve the present burden of manually aggregating and sharing clinical data, effectively eliminating discrepancies and errors caused by today’s process. It will improve patient care and reduce costs by maintaining EHR availability and guarding against cyber attacks.

Value Add

● Security: Fully secure platform for parsing, storing, and analyzing data

● Interoperability: Designed to work with the device data outputs that companies are already providing to physicians and patients; supports a wide array of common database queries, workflows, and datatypes

● User-Centered Design: Modular components and an easy-to-use interface tailored to clinicians, researchers, and non-technical users, which adapts based on clinical use needs

● Robust Results: Catches and filters human errors such as data inconsistencies and outliers, helping fix mistakes and formally guarantee data security and correctness

● Privacy-Preserving Analytics: Protects patient privacy while enabling efficient data analysis

● Easy Integration: Seamlessly integrates into existing infrastructure without requiring new hardware or workflows

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This research was, in part, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States Government.