Patent Application Titled “Deniable Digital Health Diagnoses” Published Online (USPTO 20210043284)

2021 FEB 25 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- According to news reporting originating from Washington, D.C., by NewsRx journalists, a patent application by the inventors LIPHARDT, Jan T. (Palo Alto, CA); JUN, Brian (Mountain View, CA), filed on August 11, 2019, was made available online on February 11, 2021.

The assignee for this patent application is Healthblock Inc. (Palo Alto, California, United States).

Reporters obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “The emergence and adoption of modern technologies such as smart phones, social networks, and internet applications is changing not only how we communicate, but is also changing how we request, deliver, and receive health care. The use of such modern technologies in a health care ecosystem is often referred to as ‘digital health’. The expectation of the participants (e.g., patients, physicians, hospitals, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) in a digital health ecosystem is that these technologies will improve health care efficiencies and/or health care outcomes. As such, the proliferation of digital health initiatives and applications is growing at a rapid pace.

“In today’s digital health ecosystem, vast amounts of patient health information (e.g., diagnoses, treatment history, medications, etc.) are stored electronically in many disparate locations and frequently accessed and/or shared by large numbers of participants in the ecosystem. Various laws, regulations, guidelines, and other types of governance have been enacted to establish bounds for managing the disclosure and ongoing safekeeping of such health information while considering the privacy rights and/or preferences of the participants. In the United States, for example, the Security Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) specifically addresses the handling of protected health information (PHI). Specifically, the Security Rule of HIPAA was established to protect a patient’s personally identifiable information (PII) while still allowing digital health ecosystem participants access to needed PHI. The Security Rule of HIPAA supports flexible adoption of technologies that facilitate the handling of PHI. Whether by reasons of law or for other reasons, patients, health care providers, insurance companies, banks, and other entities that handle health information all have strong incentives to protect sensitive health information.

“Unfortunately, while the disclosure and distribution of a patient’s health information may be governed according to HIPAA and/or other laws, regulations, or incentives, there remain associations between a particular patient’s health information and the corresponding patient. As an example, a patient who visits a doctor to obtain a diagnosis pertaining to some health condition is ‘known’ by the doctor, and any diagnosis associated with the patient is documented in the patient’s records. Even though the doctor might properly observe PHI governance (e.g., in strict observance of all applicable HIPAA rules, in strict observance of patient-doctor confidentiality, etc.), the association between the patient and the diagnoses nevertheless exists and is thus subject to intentional and/or accidental disclosure.

“Furthermore, even when a patient uses digital technology to interface with a health care provider, a digital trace (e.g., electronic information comprising PII, IP addresses, user identifiers, device identifiers, etc.) of the interaction is often sufficient for determining an association between the patient and his or her health information (e.g., a diagnosis, etc.). As such, current approaches to managing the privacy of digital health information fail to dissociate patients from their health information and, as a consequence, a patient is unable to achieve anonymity as pertains to his or her health information. This lack of patient anonymity is often of great concern to patients that desire ‘deniable diagnoses.’ Deniable diagnoses are dissociated from respective patients so as to allow any particular patient to ‘deny’ that a diagnosis was ever requested, determined, and/or delivered. For example, a patient might want to be able to deny that a diagnosis had been made in situations when a particular diagnosis--or even a request for a diagnosis--can bring about a personal and/or family stigma, and/or a denial of services, and/or other negative consequences. What is needed is a way for health care providers to deliver deniable diagnoses to patients.”

In addition to obtaining background information on this patent application, NewsRx editors also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent application: “The present disclosure describes techniques used in systems, methods, and in computer program products for deniable digital health diagnoses, which techniques advance the relevant technologies to address technological issues with legacy approaches. Certain embodiments are directed to technological solutions for implementing an anonymous health data management framework to secretly match a particular anonymous user to his or her anonymous health data that is published to an Internet-accessible location for access only by the particular anonymous user.

“The disclosed embodiments modify and improve over legacy approaches. In particular, the herein-disclosed techniques provide technical solutions that address the technical problems attendant to anonymously delivering diagnoses and/or other health information to anonymous patients in a digital health ecosystem. Some of such technical solutions involve specific implementations (i.e., data organization, data communication paths, module-to-module interrelationships, etc.) that relate to the software arts for improving computer functionality. For example, the disclosed anonymous data repository comprises a digest of entries that are configured to be efficiently scanned by a participant so as to reduce the latency and/or computing resource consumption when accessing anonymous health data of the anonymous data repository. More specifically, the data structures as disclosed herein and their use serve to reduce both memory usage and CPU cycles as compared to alternative approaches.

“The ordered combination of steps of the embodiments serve in the context of practical applications that perform steps for implementing an anonymous health data management framework to secretly match a particular anonymous user to his or her anonymous health data that is published to a network-accessible repository for access only by the particular anonymous user. Specifically, the disclosed embodiments for implementing an anonymous health data management framework to secretly match a particular anonymous user to his or her anonymous health data involves technological solutions that pertain to technological problems that arise in the hardware and software arts that underlie digital health record ecosystems. Aspects of the present disclosure achieve performance and other improvements in peripheral technical fields including (but not limited to) anonymous digital publishing and cyber threat countermeasures.

“This disclosure includes many embodiments of many practical applications. In addition to the disclosed methods specific to implementing an anonymous digital health data management framework, other practical applications pertain to availability and use of a biomaterials collection and delivery kit. Such a kit comprises a biomaterial container having an association to an identification code, and a user card having printed thereon the identification code. The biomaterial container is configured with an association to the identification code. The identification code does not include any personally identifiable information. Moreover, the identification code does not include any patient health information. The contents of the biomaterial container are used to generate anonymous analysis results, which anonymous analysis results are published to a data repository that comprises anonymous health data entries. The anonymous user, possibly using an app, is able to form an access request that comprises at least a portion of the identification code. The identification code or portion thereof is used for matching to at least one of the anonymous health data entries.

“An additional practical application pertains to executable code on a user device (e.g., an app), which executable code implements portions of a method for delivering deniable digital health diagnoses. Such executable code is posted as a downloadable instance of a software application. An agent (e.g., a host of a download service) responds to a request to download the software application. The software application is configured to carry out steps of (1) initializing itself on a user device; and (2) accessing a health data entry provided by a health care provider, where the health data entry corresponds to a subject anonymous user.

“The app is not notified when the health care provider provides anonymous analysis results in response to analyzing biomaterials from a plurality of anonymous users (e.g., including the user who downloads the app); however, the anonymous analysis results are published to a data repository as anonymous health data comprising entries that are published in response to provisions of the anonymous analysis results by the health care provider. Periodically, the app forms access requests to be processed over the data repository so as to match the subject anonymous user with at least one of the entries.

“Further details of aspects, objectives, and advantages of the technological embodiments are described herein and in the drawings and claims.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A biomaterial delivery kit used in delivering deniable digital health diagnoses to an Internet-accessible location, the biomaterial delivery kit comprising: a user card, the user card having printed thereon an identification code; and a biomaterial container configured to have the same identification code as the identification code of the user card and configured to contain subject biomaterials that correspond to a subject anonymous user; wherein anonymous health data that corresponds to anonymous analysis results of the subject biomaterials are published to a data repository; and wherein access requests issued to the data repository are processed to match the subject anonymous user with one or more entries of the data repository; and wherein the identification code of the user card is used to access at least one of the one or more entries that correspond to the subject anonymous user.

“2. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 1, wherein the identification code of the user card serves to prevent access to the one or more entries by users other than the subject anonymous user.

“3. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 1, wherein at least some of the entries are encrypted prior to being published to the data repository.

“4. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 1, wherein the subject anonymous user is matched with the at least one of the entries, based at least in part on a successful decryption of the at least one of the entries.

“5. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 1, wherein the entries are published to one or more partitions of the data repository with an association to one or more container barcode attributes.

“6. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 5, wherein the one or more container barcode attributes comprise at least one of, an encryption keyword, or a publication channel.

“7. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 5, wherein one or more digest entries corresponding to the subject biomaterials are published to the data repository.

“8. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 7, wherein the digest entries are encrypted prior to being published to the data repository.

“9. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 7, wherein the access requests are processed to match the subject anonymous user with at least one of the digest entries of the data repository in response to analysis of the subject biomaterials from the subject anonymous user.

“10. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 9, wherein the subject anonymous user is matched with the at least one of the one or more digest entries, based at least in part on a successful decryption of the at least one of the digest entries.

“11.-30. (canceled)

“31. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 1, wherein the biomaterial container and the user card both have the identification code and wherein the identification code does not include any personally identifiable information of the subject anonymous user.

“32. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 1, wherein the identification code is represented as machine-readable symbols or as a machine-readable barcode.

“33. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 32, wherein the user card comprises a set of card barcode attributes.

“34. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 33, wherein at least one of the card barcode attributes describes a user data request key.

“35. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 33, wherein at least one of the card barcode attributes comprises an encryption keyword.

“36. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 35, wherein the encryption keyword is used to determine if a decryption attempt is successful.

“37. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 35, wherein at least one of the card barcode attributes describes a publication channel.

“38. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 37, wherein the encryption keyword is also the publication channel.

“39. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 37, wherein the publication channel attribute is used to determine a target partition of the data repository.

“40. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 33, wherein the biomaterial container comprises set of container barcode attributes.

“41. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 40 wherein at least one of the container barcode attributes describes a publication service endpoint.

“42. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 40, wherein at least one of the container barcode attributes describes a user data publication key.

“43. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 1, further comprising access to executable code that is posted as a downloadable instance of a software application.

“44. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 43, further comprising executable code installed on a user device, the executable code to invoke one or more of the access requests to an anonymous data repository.

“45. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 44, wherein at least one of the access requests to the anonymous data repository is invoked by scanning a barcode on the user card.

“46. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 45, wherein at least one of the access requests comprises a user data request key derived from the barcode.

“47. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 44, wherein, in response to a successful decryption of at least one of the entries, the executable code publishes an anonymous response to an anonymous response repository.

“48. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 47, wherein the anonymous response is encrypted using a user data publication key.

“49. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 47, wherein the anonymous response comprises a question.

“50. The biomaterial delivery kit of claim 47, wherein the anonymous response repository is accessible by at least one healthcare provider at the Internet-accessible location.”

For more information, see this patent application: LIPHARDT, Jan T.; JUN, Brian. Deniable Digital Health Diagnoses. Filed August 11, 2019 and posted February 11, 2021. Patent URL: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220210043284%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20210043284&RS=DN/20210043284

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