Patent ID: 7974924

Claim:
A method for communicating a medical file of a patient, said medical file including personal demographic information and medical data, the method comprising: separating the patient medical file into a plurality of layers including a demographic layer comprising the demographic information and a data layer comprising the medical data, wherein the medical data includes a diagnostic image; encrypting the demographic layer using a first encryption key; encrypting the data layer using a second encryption key, wherein the second encryption key is different from the first encryption key; sending the encrypted demographic layer and data layer to a server which is capable of decrypting one of the encrypted demographic layer and the data layer but not both; decrypting the data layer at the server; performing an operation on the decrypted data layer, wherein the operation performed on the decrypted data layer comprises selecting a portion of said diagnostic image; re-encrypting the data layer including the selected portion of said diagnostic image; sending the encrypted demographic layer to a destination device; receiving the encrypted demographic layer at the destination device; decrypting the encrypted demographic layer in the destination device and recovering a pointer to the data layer; sending a request, based on the pointer, from the destination device to the server requesting transmission of the re-encrypted data layer; sending the re-encrypted data layer from the server to the destination device in response to the request from the destination device; receiving the re-encrypted data layer at the destination device; and decrypting the re-encrypted data layer in the destination device.