Breach Risk Magnitude: A Quantitative Measure of Database Security.

A quantitative methodology is described that provides objective evaluation of the potential for health record system breaches. It assumes that breach risk increases with the number of potential records that could be exposed, while it decreases when more authentication steps are required for access. The breach risk magnitude (BRM) is the maximum value for any system user of the common logarithm of the number of accessible database records divided by the number of authentication steps needed to achieve such access.

A secure and efficiently searchable health information architecture.

Patient-centric repositories of health records are an important component of health information infrastructure. However, patient information in a single repository is potentially vulnerable to loss of the entire dataset from a single unauthorized intrusion. A new health record storage architecture, the personal grid, eliminates this risk by separately storing and encrypting each person's record.

A proposed national research and development agenda for population health informatics: summary recommendations from a national expert workshop.

Objective: The Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health IT hosted a 1-day symposium sponsored by the National Library of Medicine to help develop a national research and development (R&D) agenda for the emerging field of population health informatics (PopHI).

Material And Methods: The symposium provided a venue for national experts to brainstorm, identify, discuss, and prioritize the top challenges and opportunities in the PopHI field, as well as R&D areas to address these.

Results: This manuscript summarizes the findings of the PopHI symposium.