Fittleworth

Sensitive information, protected where it is stored

Clinical Respect was Fittleworth’s service for healthcare professionals. Its website hosted ProVIS, a free online tool that gave nurses, GPs and NHS commissioners access to dispensing data for the patients who had chosen Fittleworth as their Dispensing Appliance Contractor.

Information like that has to be protected wherever it is kept, and the site stated that security measures were in place to keep patient information confidential. Fittleworth asked us for a module that would encrypt sensitive information before it was stored and decrypt it again when the service needed it, and that module was part of how the site protected the data.

Clinical Respect’s ProVIS page, Fittleworth’s online dispensing data tool, in 2019

Animated illustration: details from the website and the database pass through one shared lock and come back protected, with the key kept separately

One module, used by the website and the database

In 2015 we built the module in C# on .NET. It used 256-bit Rijndael encryption, the cipher family that the AES standard is based on, with keys held in a password-protected certificate rather than in the code or the database.

The same module could be reached in two ways:

A small web service with encrypt and decrypt functions, for the website and other applications
Functions installed inside SQL Server, so the database could encrypt and decrypt directly within its own queries

Because both routes used one shared component, information encrypted by one could be read by the other, and errors were logged centrally.

Why it mattered

ProVIS let healthcare professionals review their patients’ dispensing data, and Clinical Respect published examples of specialist nurses using ProVIS reports to spot over-ordering and support their patients. With sensitive fields encrypted and the key held in a separate certificate, a copy of the database on its own would not reveal them.

It is a good example of the kind of work we do for healthcare organisations: building data protection into a system from the start rather than adding it afterwards.