Many organizations, such as banks, healthcare entities, universities, insurance companies, etc., deal with sensitive data. Sensitive data is data that is subject to restrictions on transportation, storage, and/or who has access to the data. Sensitive data is often subject to regulations, such as healthcare data subject to HIPAA and other regulations in the United States, financial data subject to FDIC and other regulations, and personally identifying data subject privacy regulations in the European Union. Not all sensitive data is subject to government regulations, but the data holder may desire to restrict the dissemination of the data.
In some cases, the sources of sensitive data may be distributed, so that an authenticated user must access several disparate systems to retrieve the data. As one non-limiting example, a physician prescribing a certain medication, such as, for example, a controlled substance under the local state law, may be required to or may want to view the controlled substance prescription history of the patient, but this information may not be available at one source. Currently in the United States, each state government operates its own state specific Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) to track the dispensed prescription history of controlled substances. Each state may also select different PDMP data service provider to provide access to the state's PDMP data. To prevent controlled substance abuse, the physician may be required to access the PDMP data of the local state and may also want to access the PDMP data of the neighboring states, each state may require a separate authentication procedure and potentially using entirely different data service providers and different supporting systems.
However, access to the various PDMP data service providers is slow and cumbersome. Currently, the average response time from a state PDMP data service provider is between 6-15 seconds. Sometimes it can take more than 20 seconds to nearly 3 minutes if a patient has a long prescription history of controlled substances. The long wait time and the efforts required to login to very single state's PDMP provider discourages practitioners from complying with regulations to access the various states' PDMP systems. Moreover, in some cases, the sensitive nature of the data or restrictions applicable to the data may result in prohibitions on modifying the data, prohibitions on storing the data in a non-temporary manner, and prohibitions on transmitting the data in an unsecure manner.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds