Securing Information Technology in Healthcare (SITH)

May 16-17th, 2010
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire

Information technology (IT) has great potential to improve healthcare quality while also improving efficiency, and thus has been a major focus of recent healthcare reform efforts. For example, the U.S. government has committed up to $1.2 billion in 2010 to support conversion to electronic health records (EHRs). In addition, advances in mobile medical devices, including embeddable medical sensors, will enable long-term continuous medical monitoring of patient medical conditions (e.g., blood-sugar sensors for diabetics) and behavior (e.g., diet, smoking), increasing the amount and type of information that can be included in EHRs and used to improve patient care.

This interdisciplinary workshop addressed three related challenges for IT in healthcare:

1. Security and usability of mobile, sensor and implantable technologies that monitor patient health; 
2. Security and usability of electronic health records (EHR);
3. Understanding of, and communication of, the privacy and security risks from #1 and #2 to various stakeholders

The Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (ISTS) hosted the SITH workshop on May 17th and 18th, 2010 with support from the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division and the National Science Foundation.