I've been toying with an idea for several years now to facilitate data exchange 
between health services/providers. Over the last 10 years or so here in 
Australia the government has funded many projects to allow secure messaging 
between providers. The majority of projects flopped but one stuck. There are 
now two players in the market both are now corporate entities (Even though one 
was a NGO with FOSS application).

One system (HealthLink) is a push pull system that(I believe) stores the data 
in New Zealand. This is initiated from the poster (ie sending discharge or 
report).

The second is Argus - it just uses SMTP to send data.

The Government is now in its last bid to force all Australian to have 
electronic health records(My Health Record). It was an opt in system but the 
public didn't trust the Government so now its an opt out.

I have been involved from the early days of trying to get some sort of secure 
data exchange that is controlled by the consumer. I have many a time stated the 
best approach would be a secure, encrypted peer to peer system to push and pull 
data at the request of the consumer. Even though many Government Departments 
involved thought the idea was good they didn't know how to implement plus I 
think the mandate was more about the Government having access to personal data. 

Where Tor may fit...

The Tor network would provide the secure transport - each site would create an 
onion address. Central servers would keep tab of address and public keys for 
each site and practitioner. (down side of the current key infrastructure is the 
Government creates the key pair and keeps a copy, I would suggest the 
practitioners create there own keys). The system would use HL7 for data 
exchange. An app on the practitioners sever would then interpret the requests 
and talk to the SQL DB. 

The Practitioners DB would have to be modified for permissions to access data 
based on the customers request. Most DBs all ready have logic fields for 
consent on many aspects of the clinical data - ie consent for data to be used 
for chronic disease research, SMS reminders etc.

The only area I fail is the ability for a customer to access there record to 
set permissions...

Any thoughts out there?

Regards,

Paul Templeton
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