Making medical records more resilient

Hurricane Katrina showed that the current methods for handling medical records are minimally resilient to large scale disasters. This research presents a preliminary model for measuring the resilience of medical records systems against public policy goals and uses the model to illuminate the current state of medical record resilience. From this analysis, three recommendations for how to make medical records more resilient are presented. The recommendations are: 1) Federal and state governments should use the preliminary resilience model introduced here as the basis for compliance requirements for electronic medical record technical architectures. 2) Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) should consider offering services in disaster management to healthcare organizations. This will help RHIOs create sustainable business models. 3) Storage companies should consider developing distributed storage solutions based on Distributed Hash Table (DHT) technology for medical record storage. Distributed storage would alleviate public concerns over privacy with centralized storage of medical records. Empirical evidence is presented demonstrating the performance of DHT technology using a prototype medical record system.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Technology and Policy Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Rudin, Robert (Robert Samuel)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Peter Szolovits.

• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41567

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41567