Last updated: June 10, 2010

MyDelivery

Project Lead: Frank Walker (Senior Electronics Engineer).
Other CEB Participants: Girish Lingappa

The goal of this project, seen as a successor to DocView, is to develop a new collaborative tool to improve the delivery and exchange of medical and health information, especially information contained in very large files. MyDelivery is intended to enable biomedical researchers, administrators, librarians, physicians, patients, hospitals, and other health professionals to exchange medical information, regardless of the size of the electronic file or the number of files in which it resides. When the MyDelivery server is equipped for TLS or SSL communications, this communication method is fast, easy, reliable, safe, and secure.

The MyDelivery project seeks to overcome three significant obstacles. The first, to discover a way to send not only large electronic files over the Internet, but also large numbers of files. The second, to create a way to send large files reliably over wireless networks, which tend to be unreliable, but which are becoming ubiquitous. The third is to comply with requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requiring that communications be secure and verifiable (data transmitted without being modified during transmission). To solve all three problems, the MyDelivery project focuses on the development of server-based software, and the development of client software for use by collaborators. The client user interface is designed to have the look and feel of email, without any of the disadvantages of email (e.g., limitations on attachment size and number of attachments).

The development work for MyDelivery has been completed, and a prototype system was beta tested for seven months in 2009. Following that, the system architecture was updated as a result of user feedback. The result is a prototype tool consisting of a server-mediated exchange of data between two clients, in which there is no storage of any user data on the server’s hard disk. The server acts as a router, and user data is kept for only few hundred milliseconds in server memory. This memory-centric system architecture minimizes the chance that user data could be lost if the server fails. In addition, we created an Applications Programming Interface (API) that allows designers to integrate computers or devices with MyDelivery. We have tested the ability to send over 17,000 files attached to a single message. In addition, the system has been shown capable of communicating extremely large file attachments, with the largest attachment successfully tested being 28 gigabytes in size. Finally, the system has been shown to reliably communicate over intermittent wireless networks.

We are no longer hosting a MyDelivery server, but instead we are placing the source code for the client, API, and server into the public domain to encourage other organizations to use it for creating their own customized MyDelivery systems for their environments. Organizations interested in possible collaboration with us using MyDelivery for health science applications should contact Mr. Frank Walker. Client and Server user manuals, plus the source code is available below.