PACS image security server

Medical image security in a PACS environment has become a pressing issue as communications of images increasingly extends over open networks, and hospitals are currently hard-pushed by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to be HIPPA complaint for ensuring health data security. Other security-related guidelines and technical standards continue bringing to the public attention in healthcare. However, there is not an infrastructure or systematic method to implement and deploy these standards in a PACS. In this paper, we first review DICOM Part15 standard for secure communications of medical images and the HIPAA impacts on PACS security, as well as our previous works on image security. Then we outline a security infrastructure in a HIPAA mandated PACS environment using a dedicated PACS image security server. The server manages its own database of all image security information. It acts as an image is Authority for checking and certificating the image origin and integrity upon request by a user, as a secure DICOM gate-way to the outside connections and meanwhile also as a PACS operation monitor for HIPAA supporting information.