HIPAA Security Mechanisms for Medical Devices

The HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) defines regulations to help protect patient’s information. Now as the health information technology (Health IT) environment becomes an even more integral part in the field of medicine, it is vital that HIPAA’s privacy protection is applied to the handling of patient’s information by medical devices. These devices not only perform their intended medical functionality, but they also perform other functionalities that can be affected by security threats. As a result, HIPAA’s privacy guidelines need to be enforced by appropriate security mechanisms within these medical devices. Security mechanisms can be described by software patterns. A few of these patterns will be discussed, showing how they can handle such threats. We will survey existing patterns and identify which other patterns would be necessary.