CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar

Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Ben Adida

Title:  Health Privacy in a Facebook World

Abstract:  While the press raves about the coming revolution of “personalized medicine”, it remains a challenge for an individual to obtain simply a usable copy of their complete medical record. Recently, Microsoft, Google, and the Dossia consortium each launched their own version of Personally Controlled Health Records (PCHRs), technology that enables individuals to take control of their medical record, combining hospital data and personal annotations, and sharing it with family and doctors as they see fit.

It is clear that, as more of this data is made available to users, programmatic interfaces will emerge so that medical devices can connect and upload data and third-party applications can connect to download and interpret data. We are getting close to a “Facebook Platform” for health data.

And the key question is, of course, privacy.

This talk will explore work by the Children’s Hospital Informatics team on exploiting PCHRs to provide services to patients while enforcing and respecting their privacy. Much of this work is in its early stages, and feedback/discussion is welcome.

Bio: Ben Adida is a member of the Faculty at Harvard Medical School and at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, as well as a research fellow with the Center for Research on Computation and Society with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research is focused on security and privacy of health data, the security of web applications, and the design of secure voting systems.