ePocrates™, an American handheld physician network, has partnered with Certicom to apply Certicom’s Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)*and SSL technologies to provide multi-layer security for its electronic prescription platform.

Certicom’s security technology will be applied at two layers: Certicom’s SSL Plus will be utilized to secure the network layer, while its ECC technology will used to sign and encrypt data at the application layer, protecting all data both on the device and in transit. Using this technology, ePocrates can ensure that a prescription digitally signed on the physician’s handheld is unchanged when it reaches the pharmacy and is dispensed to the patient.

Currently, ePocrates’s gRx, a handheld drug reference, is helping doctors to reduce medication errors by providing them with up-to-date drug dosing and other clinical information. In the future, the company will enable healthcare professionals to prescribe medication via a secure, wireless, Palm handheld device and the Internet.

*Certicom’s patented ECC implementation results in faster processing speed, reduced bandwidth usage, and decreased battery requirements compared with conventional public key cryptographic algorithms.