Patent Issued for Secure access to individual information (USPTO 11087021)

2021 AUG 30 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- From Alexandria, Virginia, NewsRx journalists report that a patent by the inventors Grinberg, Yakov P. (Sammamish, WA, US), Khassanov, Raif (Sammamish, WA, US), Kolker, Eugene (Kirkland, WA, US), Luskin, Eugene (Issaquah, WA, US), filed on January 27, 2020, was published online on August 10, 2021.

The patent’s assignee for patent number 11087021 is Vyrty Corporation (Issaquah, Washington, United States).

News editors obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “Various kinds of services performed with respect to individuals rely on information about the individual. For example, medical services provided to a patient often rely on information about the patient including innate patient attributes such as date of birth, weight, and height; results of tests such as blood pressure, pulse, blood panels, and radiological studies; diagnostic and interventional histories; and health insurance information. In some contexts, the above is referred to as “patient health information.” Financial services provided to a person often rely on information about the person such as Social Security number and other identifying information, credit score, employment history, and account numbers and balances. National border regulation services performed with respect to travelers often rely on information about the traveler such as identifying information, citizenship and residency status, international travel history, and photographs.

“For many of these kinds of services, the advent of cloud-based storage has been accompanied by techniques for storing the corresponding individual information in the cloud, often in connection with some kind of security technique designed to reduce the risk of unauthorized access to the information. For example, cloud-based electronic medical record systems seek to store patient information on Internet-connected storage devices, such that medical service providers in a variety of locations can access the patient’s electronic medical record via the Internet.”

As a supplement to the background information on this patent, NewsRx correspondents also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “The inventors have recognized that the sorts of detailed individual information used in performing many kinds of services with respect to individuals can have significant value to data thieves, for eventual use in identity theft, blackmail, fraud, insider trading, marketing expensive niche products and services, etc. The inventors have further recognized that such unauthorized access to and exploitation of a person’s individual information can be extremely expensive or otherwise disadvantageous to the person, and/or others.

“The inventors have further recognized that there are a variety of kinds of information technology exploits and attacks available to information thieves that can be effective in gaining unauthorized access to data stored on any Internet-connected storage devices, even those that implement relatively sophisticated security techniques, despite ongoing efforts to protect such stored data.

“Accordingly, the inventors have concluded that individual information stored in an Internet-accessible storage device to facilitate retrieval by a service provider is vulnerable to theft by information thieves, even when sophisticated, and even state-of-the-art security techniques are used.

“For these reasons, the inventors have conceived and reduced to practice a software and/or hardware facility for providing secure, geographically-diverse access to individual information (“the facility”). In some embodiments, the facility enables exchange of a patient’s electronic health information between healthcare providers (doctors, physicians, nurses, testing laboratories, imaging centers, and other certified individuals) via secure media that is in possession and under control of the patient.

“In some embodiments, the facility uses a portable data storage device such as a smart card or other device sized similarly to a credit card to store each user’s data. Where the facility is used to store health data, for example, in some embodiments the data storage device is incorporated into each user’s medical insurance card or healthcare organization membership card. In particular, a data storage device stores the user’s data in encrypted form, as well as credentials for the user. In some embodiments, the user credentials are, e.g., a security certificate and/or one or more cryptographic keys. In some embodiments, these credentials for the user are originated in a physically and communicatively isolated location (“a vault”) into which no network connections pass, and are copied to the user’s smart card inside this vault. In some embodiments, user’s individual information and the user’s credentials are stored separately and/or in a manner that isolates them from each other, such as in different physical or logical storage devices contained within the smart card.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A computer-readable medium not constituting a signal per se that stores contents configured to cause a computing system to: to analyze health service trends, by an analysis server: from each of a plurality of reader devices, receive health service information aggregated from health service information for each of a plurality of patients whose portable health information storage devices were connected to the reader device; and perform one or more analysis operations against the aggregated received health service information to obtain at least one analysis result.

“2. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein the computer-readable medium has contents configured to further cause a computing system to output the analysis result.

“3. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein the at least one analysis result comprises a health trend discerned from the aggregated health service information.

“4. The computer-readable medium of claim 1 wherein the at least one analysis result comprises a treatment trend discerned from the aggregated health service information.

“5. A data access device among a plurality of data access devices, the data access device configured to access personal information on a portable storage device, the data access device comprising: a first interface configured to communicatively connect the data access device to the portable storage device, which contains encrypted health information for a person; a hardware processor configured to interact with the encrypted health information contained by the portable storage device; and a second interface configured to communicatively connect the data access device to an analytics server to convey to the analytics server for analysis health information aggregated from health information retrieved from a plurality of portable access devices each containing health information for a different person.

“6. The data access device of claim 5 wherein the processor is configured to limit conveyance of health information to the analytics server via the second interface to health information that is aggregated across at least a minimum number of people.

“7. The data access device of claim 6 wherein the minimum number of people is ten.

“8. The data access device of claim 5 wherein the first interface comprises at least one electrical contact.

“9. The data access device of claim 8 wherein the first interface is configured to interface with a smart card.

“10. The data access device of claim 5 wherein the first interface comprises a wireless transceiver.

“11. The data access device of claim 10 wherein the first interface comprises an active radio transceiver.

“12. The data access device of claim 10 wherein the first interface is configured to conduct Wi-Fi communication.

“13. The data access device of claim 10 wherein the first interface is configured to conduct Bluetooth communication.

“14. The data access device of claim 10 wherein the first interface is configured to conduct NFC communication.

“15. The data access device of claim 10 wherein the first interface comprises a passive RFID radio transceiver.

“16. The data access device of claim 10 wherein the first interface comprises an infrared transceiver.

“17. The data access device of claim 10 wherein the first interface is configured to interface with a smartphone.

“18. One or more memories collectively containing a data structure, the data structure comprising: health service information stored in the one or more memories that represents health service information collected from two or more reader devices, the health service information collected from each reader device representing health service information received from a plurality of portable storage devices, each portable storage device having been carried into physical proximity of the reader device by a person whose individual health service information the portable storage device stores and transfers to the reader device, wherein the health service information collected from each reader device is aggregated from individual health service information of no less than a threshold minimum number of people, in a way that dissociates the aggregated individual health service information from the identity of these people, the health service information utilized to perform, by an analytics computing device, healthcare analytics with respect to the health service experience of the people carrying the portable storage devices.

“19. The one or more memories of claim 18 wherein the threshold minimum number of people is ten.”

For additional information on this patent, see: Grinberg, Yakov P. Secure access to individual information. U.S. Patent Number 11087021, filed January 27, 2020, and published online on August 10, 2021. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=11087021.PN.&OS=PN/11087021RS=PN/11087021

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