For Immediate Release February 22, 2006

For More Information Contact: Rich Schneider, 317-278-4564 rcschnei@iupui.edu

IUPUI Computer Scientists Develop Revolutionary Medical Information System

INDIANAPOLIS - Two Computer and Information Science faculty members at Purdue University School of Science, IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) have developed an Internet-based medical information system which they believe can help propel health care into the hi-tech age, save lives and cut costs.

Developed by Assistant Professors Yuanshun Dai and Xukai Zou, the medical information system not only solves the critical problems that have stymied development of an electronic health information system – security, reliability, and data integration - but does so within a single middleware system without modifying any existed databases and applications.

In fact, they have dubbed their system the “Secure and Reliable Health Information System.” The system has been tested for a year by a veterans' administration hospital located adjacent to IUPUI.

Featuring a patented mechanism, cryptography, a portable USB security key and a password, the medical information system is as safe from hackers and other unauthorized users as the gold in Fort Knox, according to Dai and Zou.

The scientists developed the new technology for the medical information system at the Trusted Electronics and Grid Obfuscation (TEGO) Research and Education Center they founded at IUPUI in 2004. TEGO means shield in Latin.

According to Dai and Zou, TEGO protects the system/network/information not only from outside malicious attacks but also from inside bugs/faults. The purpose of TEGO is actually to build trusted collaborative computing environments and applications which are highly secure and dependable by combining Security and Reliability using secure group communication and grid computing technologies.

The cry for a safe and reliable electronic health information system prompted George W. Bush to set as a national goal having electronic health records for every person in his 2004 State of the Union address.

Experts say such a system could save lives and billions of dollars.

An editorial in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization last spring, paints a grim picture of the human and financial costs

“When a patient is taken to a local hospital, emergency doctors are likely to have no idea of his medical history, which medications he takes or which tests or treatments he has had. When discharged, his family physician is unlikely to receive a discharge report, nor are their many mechanisms for follow-up. This is why almost a third of the hospitalizations of senior citizens are the result of medication toxicity, and almost half of serious medication errors occur because clinicians do not have enough information about their patients or the drugs they are prescribing for them.

“Why? In today's environment, patient information is scattered across the health care network. This means millions of health care dollars are wasted every day duplicating prescriptions and re-ordering laboratory and diagnostic tests because of lost or misplaced results.”

Their system, the scientists say, allows multiple users in multiple locations to access the system anytime, anywhere. “Our scheme solved challenges in a holistic manner that has not been solved by other schemes in terms of group communication, key management, seamless data integration, fine-tuned hierarchical access control, safety and reliability.”

One key advantage to their approach, they added, is that there is no need to modify data, which may be stored in various formats of different databases. A second important advantage is that the degree of access to information can be varied, depending upon the need of the user to see all or just part of the information.

While their approach was designed for medical information, it may be used to safeguard any kind of electronic information, such as Banking systems, Government systems, Military systems etc.

“A main objective of our TEGO Center is to change the current vulnerable and failure-prone Internet to a trusted environment,” Dai said. ###