The National Science Foundation has awarded Dartmouth College a $3 million federal grant, which is part of the federal stimulus bill, to develop secure,  efficient systems that enabled physicians to monitor patients through mobile phones and wearable wireless sensors. The three year project aims to explore the security challenges related to protecting patient data while also making sure that the healthcare providers can access the information that they need.

Dartmouth College faculty will work with partners from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont along with industry partners Intel Labs and Google.

The project is called the Trustworthy Information Systems for Healthcare (TISH) and its full agenda sees the team examining privacy concerns, security challenges and studying economic risks and benefits.

"The team will develop new secure, efficient, and easy-to-use protocols that allow remote health monitoring through mobile phone and wearable wireless medical sensors; design new machine-learning methods for analyzing and summarizing sensor data; seek a deeper understanding of the economics of information security in healthcare; and explore how patients and clinicians trade off usability, security, and privacy," according to the team's press release.

"Healthcare information systems are a key part of ARRA and are important for other pending healthcare reform proposals," David Kotz, the principal investigator for TISH and a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College said in a statement. "Developing, deploying, and using information technology that is both secure and genuinely effective in the complex clinical, organizational, and economic environment of healthcare is a significant challenge. Our research will help address the important security and privacy challenges inherent in such systems."

For more read this press release here.