August 28, 2005
By: Charlie Feigenoff
The U.S. health care system combines the sublime and the ridiculous. We have mastered the complex technology needed to transplant human hearts and create embryos in test tubes, yet we still write prescriptions by hand in the face of evidence showing that medication errors cost $2 billion and 7,000 lives annually. “It’s not that we don’t understand the damage they cost,” says University of Virginia computer scientist Alfred Weaver. “It’s just that creating a digital health care system that would incorporate e-prescriptions and other services is extremely difficult.”
The problem as Weaver sees it is that the health care system is not a single organization, but a collection of organizations—hospitals, insurers, pharmacists, and billers—with sometimes-conflicting interests and agendas. But even if these interests could be aligned, patients’ rights would still have to be protected. Any comprehensive computerized health care system must safeguard the privacy of patients and ensure the security of their records even as it promoted the flow of information from organization to organization.
Weaver and his colleagues at U.Va. have developed a prototype system for digital medicine that successfully addresses these issues. It is based on Microsoft’s .NET, a widely available, off-the-shelf Web-services program.
Their system includes an authentication Web service that assigns trust levels based on reliability of the password or biometrics that users employ to establish their identity. It contains an authorization Web service that can incorporate a series of highly specific rules for granting access to information within an organization. And it uses such techniques as trust mapping—the computerized equivalent of a diplomatic treaty—to manage and exchange authentication among health care organizations. “With these elements in place, we have a framework for protecting and securing information as it flows through the system,” says Weaver. “It sets the stage for tapping the power of digital systems to improve the care we offer patients.”
Weaver received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois in 1979 and joined the U.Va. School of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Computer Science in 1977, where he is now a professor of computer science and director of the department's Computer Networks Laboratory, the University’s Internet Commerce Group and the state's Internet Technology Innovation Center. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the supervisor of more than 50 graduate students, and co-author of four books, six book chapters and more than 100 papers.
