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Medical Professionals Aren't Leaping For E-Medicine
theodp writes "Despite all the stimulus money being directed toward developing electronic medical records, surprisingly few doctors, hospitals and insurers are using Google Health and other sites like it. One reason, Newsweek suggests, may be that Web-based personal-health records like the ones being compiled on Google Health don't appear to be covered under HIPAA, which requires that health care providers and health plans protect patient confidentiality. 'We don't connect that information to other aspects of Google,' explains Dr. Roni Zeiger, product manager for Google Health. Still, the federal government is in the process of drafting privacy recommendations that would apply to Google Health, as well as the makers of consumer apps that perform tasks like monitoring blood pressure."
Hey sg,
The thing is that a decentralised system isn't a bad thing at all. PKI was designed, from the start, to be usable as a non-centralised system (non-pyramid). Realistically speaking, using the same example as the one you offered, where a doctor needs to validate medical records provided by the patient to be truthful, you only need to verify the other doctor's credentials and a signed file.
Now we get back to the old "How do I trust another doctor's certificates?", well, we use a centralised service. Each doctor needs to enroll (Google cache of the same document) to get his certificates, and they are delivered by a central authority, possibly governmental (or whatever authority governs doctors in your country). It's not a very hard thing to do, and can be implemented for roughly a couple million dollars -- the whole system.
How many doctors are there in the US? A laughable amount if you compare how many certificates are issued for the DoD. Heck, you could even implement it to be fully PIV-C compatible, and get cross-certification from the US government, and would allow doctors' credentials to be easily validated during a crisis.
Heck, nobody even needs to own the PKI solution in the US. The government can do it for you, if you are a valid organisation, an excellent project provides certificate management for you. Outside the US it gets a bit more difficult, as interoperability is not quite as great as in the US, however PIV is starting to have quite a lot of traction in Europe as well (I can't remember off the top of my head if it's PIV-I or PIV-C that is being implemented with the UK police forces). A pretty good read (Google cache as it doesn't seem to be loading from here) about how data is provided on a PIV smartcard.
That being said, maybe the health care professionals ought to have raised their voice at the same time the engineers and scientists did (Google cache)?