New DICOM Guard Technology Ensures the Total Security of Patient Data

A new Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) application features proprietary data tagging technology, which allows healthcare enterprises to have complete control over security of their patient data.

Dicom Systems (San Francisco, CA, USA) recently introduced its new product, DICOM Guard. The product is part of the company’s DICOM and HL [health level] 7 Interface Engine Suite.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) privacy rule recognizes the necessity for healthcare organizations to share patient data and allows for the release of deidentified data for specific reasons. To safeguard the privacy interests of consumers, personal identifiers, such as name and social security number, are taken out of databases containing personal information. Deidentified patient data are an extremely helpful tool for the improvement of care and researchers have been using it to develop advanced medicine and healthcare practices for decades.

But even though the data is deidentified, organizations still need to have some safeguards in position, particularly if the images and patient data are stored off-site. The DICOM tagging technology deidentifies the data by removing all real patient identifiers, therefore only the owners of the original data and/or legally authorized entities can reidentify the patient. In the event that patient data becomes publicly available, there is no risk that the individual will be identified.

When a medical facility retrieves the data from Dicom Systems’ vendor-neutral archive, the DCMSYS router rapidly reidentifies the data, using DICOM Supplement 142 and Dicom Systems’ patent-pending tagging technology. No actual patient data are stored on any of the devices--the deidentification and reidentification happen on the fly, using a secure key unique to each client to encrypt and decrypt the data.

The product is currently in beta testing and will be released for general availability later in 2012.

Dicom Systems also offers a 100% secure web-based DICOM and HL7 routing, transformation, and interface engine appliance for clinics, hospitals, and diagnostic imaging centers.

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