The e-Logistics of Securing Distributed Medical Data

HIPAA mandates that all healthcare data accessed or transmitted over open communications systems such as the Internet be encrypted While enclypting a digital x-ray before storage and decrypting it before viewing will not affect a hospital’s workfrow, the workjlow consequences of encryption on the large medical images (a single 500-slice MRIproduces a 68 MBJiIe) typically in use by a radiology department were feared but unknown. We conducted performance studies of four candidate encryption algorithms operating in a .NET environment, and then used those results in a workjlow model of our hospital’s radiology department to predict the impact of adding encryption to the workjlow scenario.