Date of Award

12-2020

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Dr. Shameek Bhattacharjee

Second Advisor

Dr. Ajay Gupta

Third Advisor

Dr. Alvis Fong

Keywords

Connected healthcare, remote charting, security, authentication and authorization, medical

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Open Access

Abstract

Health Care Providers play a crucial role in a patients well-being. While their primary role is to treat the patient, it is also vital to ensure that they can spend adequate time with the patient to create a unique treatment plan and build a personal relationship with their patients to help them feel comfortable during their treatment. Health Care Providers are frequently required to manually record patient data to track their healthcare progress during their hospital stay. However, with hospitals continuously trying to optimize their workflows, this crucial one-on-one time with the patient is often not practical.

As a solution, this thesis puts forward a novel connected healthcare architecture known as Remote Charting System that aims to liberate the Health Care Provider from repetitive manual tasks by automating the process of medical charting, thus enabling them to spend more time with real patient-care, and improve quality of care. Furthermore, this work provides a framework for Remote Charting that automates medical charting activity and puts forward a secure by design framework that addresses authorization and authentication concerns while adhering to the patient privacy and policy constraints that hospitals need to be compliant of.

Specifically, we make the following contributions: First, we propose a communication network of connected medical devices that automates the Health Care Provider’s charting duties. Second, we conduct a threat landscape analysis of the remote charting system based on vulnerabilities found in medical devices and under a hospital environment’s unique challenges and constraints. Third, given the challenges, we propose a physical layer hypothesis testing approach towards a HIPAA compliant authorization scheme for medical devices that can be used for a remote charting application. Finally, we provide a theoretical construct of an envisioned security architecture for a remote charting system for connected health where our proposed authorization scheme is one of the modules. Finally, we design a simulated remote charting system to validate our method’s accuracy under varying parameters.

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