Age-period-cohort analysis of stroke incidence in Dijon from 1985 to 2005.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Variations in stroke incidence could be explained by changes in vascular and environmental factors that affect the risk of stroke and changes in risk factors that are present in early life. The aim of this study was to identify and measure the effects of 3 interrelated factors, age, calendar period of stroke onset, and birth year cohort, on the incidence rates of stroke from 1985 through 2005. METHODS: Age-period-cohort models were used to analyze stroke incidence in Dijon from 1985 to 2005 from a population-based registry that collects data on all stroke patients whatever the type of management, in the public hospital, private hospitals, or at home, in the population of Dijon (150,000 inhabitants). RESULTS: For ischemic stroke, the incidence rose with time in men depending not only on age, but also on the period and cohort effects (P = 0.017). For women, the incidence only depended on age (P < 0.001; incidence rate ratio, 1.085; 95% CI, 1.081 to 1.089). For hemorrhagic stroke, the rise in the incidence with time depended only on age in men, whereas in women, it depended on age, period, and cohort effects (P = 0.019). CONCLUSIONS: Age, birth cohort, and calendar period contain relevant information to define and explain trends in stroke incidence rates over a long period.

The mixed management of patients' medical records: responsibility sharing between the patient and the physician.

Through this article, we propose a mixed management of patients' medical records, so as to share responsibilities between the patient and the Medical Practitioner by making Patients responsible for the validation of their administrative information, and MPs responsible for the validation of their Patients' medical information. Our proposal can be considered a solution to the main problem faced by patients, health practitioners and the authorities, namely the gathering and updating of administrative and medical data belonging to the patient in order to accurately reconstitute a patient's medical history. This method is based on two processes. The aim of the first process is to provide a patient's administrative data, in order to know where and when the patient received care (name of the health structure or health practitioner, type of care: out patient or inpatient). The aim of the second process is to provide a patient's medical information and to validate it under the accountability of the Medical Practitioner with the help of the patient if needed. During these two processes, the patient's privacy will be ensured through cryptographic hash functions like the Secure Hash Algorithm, which allows pseudonymisation of a patient's identity. The proposed Medical Record Search Engines will be able to retrieve and to provide upon a request formulated by the Medical Practitioner all the available information concerning a patient who has received care in different health structures without divulging the patient's identity. Our method can lead to improved efficiency of personal medical record management under the mixed responsibilities of the patient and the MP.

Centralised versus decentralised management of patients' medical records.

For more than 20 years, many countries have been trying to set up a standardised medical record at the regional or at the national level. Most of them have not reached this goal, essentially due to two main difficulties related to patient identification and medical records standardisation. Moreover, the issues raised by the centralisation of all gathered medical data have to be tackled particularly in terms of security and privacy. We discuss here the interest of a non-centralised management of medical records which would require a specific procedure that gives to the patient access to his/her distributed medical data, wherever he/she is located.

Watermarking medical images with anonymous patient identification to verify authenticity.

When dealing with medical image management, there is a need to ensure information authenticity and dependability. Being able to verify the information belongs to the correct patient and is issued from the right source is a major concern. Verification can help to reduce the risk of errors when identifying documents in daily practice or when sending a patient's Electronic Health Record. At the same time, patient privacy issues may appear during the verification process when the verifier accesses patient data without appropriate authorization. In this paper we discuss the combination of watermarking with different identifiers ranging from DICOM standard UID to an Anonymous European Patient Identifier in order to improve medical image protection in terms of authenticity and maintainability.

Giving patients secure << Google-like >> access to their medical record.

The main problem for the patient who wants to have access to all of the information about his health is that this information is very often spread over many medical records. Therefore, it would be convenient for the patient, after being identified and authenticated, to use a kind of specific medical search engine as one part of the solution to this main problem. The principal objective is for the patient to have access to his or her medical information at anytime and wherever it has been stored. This proposal for secure "Google Like" access requires the addition of different conditions: very strict identity checks using cryptographic techniques such as those planned for the electronic signature, which will not only ensure authentication of the patient and integrity of the file, but also protection of the confidentiality and access follow-up. The electronic medical record must also be electronically signed by the practitioner in order to provide evidence that he has given his agreement and accepted responsibility for the content. This electronic signature also prevents any kind of post-transmission falsification. New advances in technology make it possible to envisage access to medical records anywhere and anytime, thanks to Grid and watermarking methodologies.

How to manage secure direct access of European patients to their computerized medical record and personal medical record.

The multiplication of the requests of the patients for a direct access to their Medical Record (MR), the development of Personal Medical Record (PMR) supervised by the patients themselves, the increasing development of the patients' electronic medical records (EMRs) and the world wide internet utilization will lead to envisage an access by using technical automatic and scientific way. It will require the addition of different conditions: a unique patient identifier which could base on a familial component in order to get access to the right record anywhere in Europe, very strict identity checks using cryptographic techniques such as those for the electronic signature, which will ensure the authentication of the requests sender and the integrity of the file but also the protection of the confidentiality and the access follow up. The electronic medical record must also be electronically signed by the practitioner in order to get evidence that he has given his agreement and taken the liability for that. This electronic signature also avoids any kind of post-transmission falsification. This will become extremely important, especially in France where patients will have the possibility to mask information that, they do not want to appear in their personal medical record. Currently, the idea of every citizen having electronic signatures available appears positively Utopian. But this is yet the case in eGovernment, eHealth and eShopping, world-wide. The same was thought about smart cards before they became generally available and useful when banks issued them.

Proposal of a French health identification number interoperable at the European level.

The French ministry of Health is setting up the Personal Medical Record (PMR). This innovative tool has long been expected by French Health Authorities, Associations of Patients, other Health's associations, those defending Individual Liberties and the French National Data Protection Authority. The PMR will lead to improvements in many areas such as Diagnosis (Research and monitoring) Healthcare (Management of emergencies, urgent situations, Temporal health monitoring and evaluation), Therapy (Cohorts of patients for Clinical trials and epidemiological studies). The PMR will foster safe healthcare management, clinical research and epidemiological studies. Nevertheless, it raises many important questions regarding duplicates and the quality, precision and coherence of the linkage with other health data coming from different sources. The currently planned identifying process raises many questions with regard to its ability to deal with potential duplicates and to perform data linkage with other health data sources. Through this article, using the electronic health records, we develop and propose an identification process to improve the French PMR. Our proposed unique patient identifier will guarantee the security, confidentiality and privacy of the personal data, and will prove to be particularly useful for health planning, health policies and research as well as clinical and epidemiological studies. Finally, it will certainly be interoperable with other European health information systems. We propose here an alternative identification procedure that would allow France to broaden the scope of its PMR project by making it possible to contribute to public health research and policy while increasing interoperability with European health information systems and preserving the confidentiality of the data.

New advanced technologies to provide decentralised and secure access to medical records: case studies in oncology.

The main problem for health professionals and patients in accessing information is that this information is very often distributed over many medical records and locations. This problem is particularly acute in cancerology because patients may be treated for many years and undergo a variety of examinations. Recent advances in technology make it feasible to gain access to medical records anywhere and anytime, allowing the physician or the patient to gather information from an "ephemeral electronic patient record". However, this easy access to data is accompanied by the requirement for improved security (confidentiality, traceability, integrity, ...) and this issue needs to be addressed. In this paper we propose and discuss a decentralised approach based on recent advances in information sharing and protection: Grid technologies and watermarking methodologies. The potential impact of these technologies for oncology is illustrated by the examples of two experimental cases: a cancer surveillance network and a radiotherapy treatment plan. It is expected that the proposed approach will constitute the basis of a future secure "google-like" access to medical records.

Building application-related patient identifiers: what solution for a European country?

We propose a method utilizing a derived social security number with the same reliability as the social security number. We show the anonymity techniques classically based on unidirectional hash functions (such as the secure hash algorithm (SHA-2) function that can guarantee the security, quality, and reliability of information if these techniques are applied to the Social Security Number). Hashing produces a strictly anonymous code that is always the same for a given individual, and thus enables patient data to be linked. Different solutions are developed and proposed in this article. Hashing the social security number will make it possible to link the information in the personal medical file to other national health information sources with the aim of completing or validating the personal medical record or conducting epidemiological and clinical research. This data linkage would meet the anonymous data requirements of the European directive on data protection.