US 8,788,426 B2 · Handling medical prescriptions in a secure fashion

Abstract

Techniques for secure automated dispensing of prescription medications utilize broadcast encryption to encrypt a prescription for storage on a machine-readable medium that is pre-written with a key management block (KMB). The KMB encodes a session key needed to read from or write to the medium. Each prescription-writing device and medication dispensing device is assigned a unique set of device keys, which are used to recover the session key from the medium. Only authorized devices are able to recover the session key from a medium's KMB. Thus, only authorized devices may read or validly write prescriptions from/to the machine-readable medium. In this manner, only authorized providers can write fillable prescriptions and only authorized dispensers can dispense medications to fill those prescriptions.

Claims15

Dependent claims

A method of preparing computer-readable medical prescriptions, comprising:

encrypting, by one or more computers, a prescription for medication with a prescription key;
encrypting, by the computers, the prescription key;
creating, by the computers, an encrypted session key by encrypting session numbers of an unencrypted session key using device keys that are available at one or more authorized receiving devices, wherein the unencrypted session key is derived by logically combining the session numbers;
creating, by the computers, a key management block that includes the encrypted session key, wherein the encrypted session key is decrypted by the one or more authorized receiving devices in order to decrypt the encrypted prescription key;
writing, by the computers, the encrypted prescription key to a machine-readable medium;
writing, by the computers, the encrypted prescription to the machine-readable medium;
and
writing, by the computers, the key management block to the machine-readable medium.

5 more elements

A data processing system, comprising:

one or more computers;
and
a computer-readable device including computer-readable instructions embodied on the computer-readable device, wherein the computer-readable instructions, when executed by the computers, cause the computers to perform the method of:
encrypting a prescription for medication with a prescription key;
encrypting the prescription key;
creating an encrypted session key by encrypting session numbers of an unencrypted session key using device keys that are available at one or more authorized receiving devices, wherein the unencrypted session key is derived by logically combining the session numbers;
creating a key management block that includes the encrypted session key, wherein the encrypted session key is decrypted by the one or more authorized receiving devices in order to decrypt the encrypted prescription key;
writing the encrypted prescription key to a machine-readable medium;
writing the encrypted prescription to the machine-readable medium;
and
writing the key management block to the machine-readable medium.

8 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Handling medical prescriptions in a secure fashion

Life of this patent

Handling medical prescriptions in a secure fashion

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims15