Re: Intel and AMA to post medcial records online

[John Fraser <John.Fraser@MHDI.org>]

Peter,

    We are working on similar technology in MN, to assist the health care
industry in adopting the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology.  This
technology enables digitally signing documents, encrypting emails, and generally
adding a whole lot of security to typical data communications.  It does this by
creating two keys that are mathematically related; a "public" key, and a
"private" key.  As you can imagine, you keep your private key (often on a
smartcard), and your public key is then stored in a public directory somewhere
where everybody can get to it.
    If you then encrypt or sign an email or document with your private key, only
your public key can decrypt it, thus proving you were the only one who could
have sent and/or encrypted the message.  This also allows secure access to web
sites and other systems.  Also, if someone encrypt a document with your public
key, only your private key can decrypt it, thus ensuring that encrypted files
are only read by the intended recipient.

    The important part of making this technology work is building a community
process for issuing, managing and revoking these keys.  If you don't trust this
process, then the whole system isn't trusted.  I doubt that most individuals
will trust an Intel issuing keys to lock up their medical records.  After all,
Intel's first alliegence, is to make money, then keeping their stock prices
high, and somewhere down on the list is keeping medical records private!

    In MN, we are building a community process to issue, manage, and revoke
keys, targeted at just health care professionals, not patients.  We hope to have
a pilot running in the next few weeks to test this technology.  Again, the
bottom line is trust, and trust rarely extends beyond your ability to have a
meeting and talk to everybody involved.  That is why I believe community efforts
like our will ultimately prove workable, vs. national systems.

    For more information on our pilot, called "HealthKey", please visit our web
site at: http://www.healthkey.org/mn/

My 2 cents,

JF

Peter Mitchell wrote:

> At 12:54 PM 10/12/1999 -0400, Duncan Kinder wrote:
> > >According to the following article, Intel and the AMA are working to post
> medical records online:
> > >
> > >http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-850021.html
> > >
>
> Has anyone been able to work out just what this authentication
> technology is? There's nothing in the Intel or AMA press releases about
> it.
>
> --
> Pete Mitchell

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