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Past Programs
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Keynote: Securing IT in Healthcare: Part III |
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Keynote: SITH3, Technology-Enabled Remote Monitoring and Support |
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Intersection of mHealth and Behavioral Health |
Newsletter
ISTS Information Pamphlet
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Technology infrastructure in the healthcare realm requires secure and effective systems to meet two of its most significant challenges of the 21st century: improving the quality of care and controlling costs. "As President Obama has made clear, the vision for a 21st century health system requires all health information in electronic form, delivered instantly and securely to individuals and their care providers when needed, and it should be capable of analysis for constant improvement and research," points out ISTS director Denise Anthony. Yet developing, deploying and using information technology that is both secure and genuinely effective in the complex clinical, organizational, and economic environment of healthcare is a significant challenge. This project’s multidisciplinary approach will develop and analyze information-sharing technology that ensures security and privacy while meeting the pragmatic needs of patients, clinical staff, and healthcare organizations to deliver efficient, high-quality care.
ISTS has emerged as a leader in the study of healthcare information technology security. ISTS affiliates have engaged in numerous healthcare research efforts and have been awarded more than $4M in grant funding to continue their work in areas of critical need. In just the past two years, ISTS affiliates have conducted research through:
Through these efforts ISTS researchers have published dozens of papers, presented at numerous conferences, welcomed experts from the healthcare IT security community to speak at Dartmouth, and hosted the Securing Information Technology in Healthcare (SITH) workshop. Each of these projects and more are summarized below. For more detailed information on each effort, please follow the links to the individual pages.
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The TISH project's multidisciplinary research will drive innovation in information-sharing technology that ensures security and privacy while addressing the pragmatic needs of patients, clinical staff, and healthcare organizations to deliver efficient, high-quality care. This multidisciplinary team of investigators will address fundamental challenges in current and emerging areas of information security, as identified by its healthcare partners, and will focus on four research "threads".
The NSF-funded project is a three-year effort and is a partnership among the Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (ISTS), the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), the Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in White River Junction, Vermont, The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDIHPCP), Google, and Intel.
For more information on the TISH project, please email trustworthy.infosys.healthcare@dartmouth.edu or call 603.646.0700.
Held in May 2012, this interdisciplinary workshop brought together experts from academe and the clinical environment to address five related challenges for IT in healthcare:
The SITH2 workshop was a collaborative effort of the TISH and Information Risk in Data-Oriented Enterprises (IRIDOE) projects.
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The SHARPS project will advance the sophistication, development, and deployment of security and privacy for Health Information Technology (HIT) through long-term research that is strategically managed for fundamental impact and incremental short-term benefits. SHARPS is organized around three major environments: Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), and Telemedicine (TEL), with Personal Health Records (PHRs) included as a major subtopic.
Professor David Kotz leads the Telemedicine (TEL) project and is a member of the executive committee. He also co-leads the Telemedicine project's REMOTE component (Remote Monitoring for Mobile and Assisted Living) with Professor Denise Anthony.
In addition to her work on the TEL-REMOTE component, Professor Anthony co-leads the Electronic Health Record (EHR) project's EHR-POL Component (Policy Terrain and Implications of HIT).
Watch the following video for an overview of the SHARPS project.
Professor David Kotz is collaborating with Professor Ashutosh Sabharwal of Rice University and a team from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi on this effort. The team is developing the scientific foundations for a modular “kit” of mHealth components -- portable, inexpensive, and usable by patients or healthcare workers with limited training -- that can be assembled into a variety of combinations for different circumstances or healthcare purposes. Scientifically, they are addressing two fundamental questions:
The research is working to advance usability testing of mobile applications by integrating contextualized and automated techniques. Unlike the traditional desktop environment, mobile user experience is heavily influenced by user context (physical location, transport mode, social surroundings, task intention, etc.). The novelty of this project is a model-based usability testing approach that quantitatively integrates user context. The expected outcomes include:
This project addresses an emerging research theme and an urgent practical need, and is expected to produce technology solutions and educational materials for timely dissemination. Professor David Kotz and his research team are participating in this project led by the University of Massachusetts Lowell's Professor Guanling Chen.
Professor David Kotz is leading this effort in which the team examines the privacy requirements of mobile computing technologies that have the potential to transform healthcare. Such mHealth technology enables physicians to remotely monitor patients' health, and enables individuals to manage their own health more easily. As part of the effort, the team has developed a conceptual privacy framework for mHealth, itemizing the privacy properties needed in mHealth systems, and discussing the technologies that could support privacy-sensitive mHealth systems.
This project is a continuation of the DAMSA project (Data Assurance in Medical Sensor Applications) that was completed in 2009. This portion of th effort developed methods to assess confidence in medical sensor data. The research was led by Professor Kotz and Professor Tanzeem Choudhury (now of Cornell University).
This research effort will explore HIPAA compliance in U.S. hospitals, as well as the impact of HIT on hospital quality and costs. This project seeks to accomplish the dual goals of (1) advancing the empirical evidence of the impact of HIT on hospital quality; and (2) laying the groundwork for a follow-on project to examine longitudinal effects of HIT on care quality. The project is funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as an internal grant from the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth. Denise Anthony is PI, and the project includes Eric Johnson, and a postdoc.
IRIDOE examined the security risks associated with access-control mechanisms and policies in hospitals. The project was co-led by Eric Johnson (Tuck) and Sean Smith (CS) and is funded by Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division.
This project explored the impact of electronic medical records for physician communication, and for the coordination of care of chronically ill patients. The project was led by Denise Anthony and Brooke Herndon (MD, DHMC).
