Security

Structural Issues

WoundFollowUp.com is a Store and Forward system it does not keep the images on a central computer after they have been downloaded to the doctors computers. This implies that the images are not vulnerable on the main server because they are simply not there. There are considerations for the storage at the doctors sites.

This is not an Electronic Medical Record, its purpose is to visualize the healing course of wounds. A minimal amount of textual medical information is gathered to place the images in context. The descriptive text is free form making it difficult to use by computers to extract information about patients. This makes the site unattractive to hackers.

Personal information

Security and Confidentiality
WoundFollowUp is very heavily encrypted and secure. There are two kinds of data stored in the web database, key data which says who the picture or record belongs to, and regular data, pictures, sounds and text, which will need to be presented to the user. Key data is stored as hashes, which means that it just cannot be decrypted, rather like passwords, the computer does not record the password as text, but as an irreversible transform, a hash. It can't find what the password was, it can only tell if you typed it in correctly. This way of storing key data has the great advantage that you have to ask for each patient one at a time. It is extremely secure.
The other data such as the images, sound recordings and text descriptions of the picture are stored encrypted. These are decrypted just before displaying them on the nurse's computer.
The strongest security comes from deleting the images and other data as soon as possible, seconds after they are downloaded. They are just not there to be published.
The nurse's computer is in a secure location and is subject to the customary restrictions about access and backing up.