Encrypted gateway for health IT data
The Task: A Massachusetts-based health IT business analyzes large amounts of data from hospitals in order to improve patient care and cost efficiency. Working with this sort of data is highly sensitive. The task was to get the right amount of raw data from the hospital to number-crunching servers for analysis while filtering out other data and keeping everything very safe.
The Challenge: The hardware unit had to reside within the hospital, and had to demand little to no attention from hospital staff. It had to provide an audited, secure channel to direct just the right amount of data to the data-mining servers. My client needed to be in charge of administration, configuration, and updates. There could be no incoming traffic through their firewalls. There needed to be flexible software structures to adapt to the hospital’s specific systems and transform data on the fly.
The Project: Since every bit of this work had to be open for security audits, hardware and software components got limited to the bare minimum, and so had to be carefully selected. Strong authentication and encryption around SSL standards and certificates were an important tool for maintaining the top priority: data security. I took the design from prototyping to testing, and then handed it off for evaluation to the clients.