CareBridge

CareBridge is a secure care-coordination platform that helps healthcare staff access patient records according to their job responsibilities while improving protection, accountability, and operational reliability for sensitive patient information.

Portfolio and educational project. CareBridge is designed with HIPAA-aligned technical safeguards, but it is not represented as a production HIPAA-compliant healthcare system.

Problem

Healthcare teams need timely access to patient information, but unrestricted access can expose protected health information, increase the risk of unauthorized disclosure, and make it difficult to determine who accessed a record.

Solution

CareBridge provides a role-aware patient-record workflow with secure authentication, server-side authorization, audit logging, encrypted clinical-note storage, validation, login rate limiting, and paginated APIs.

Key Features

• JWT-based authentication with bcrypt password verification
• TOTP multi-factor authentication, if enabled in the local environment
• Role-based access control for Administrator, Physician, Nurse, and Billing Specialist roles
• AES-256-GCM field-level encryption for clinical notes
• Patient-record access audit logging
• Administrator-only audit-log dashboard
• Request validation with Zod
• Centralized Express error handling
• Helmet security headers
• Login rate limiting with HTTP 429 responses after repeated attempts
• Paginated patient and audit-log API responses
• PostgreSQL 16 running through Docker Compose
• Responsive React interface with a consistent purple-and-white design

Architecture

React frontend
      |
      | HTTP requests during local development
      v
Express.js API
      |
      | JWT validation, RBAC, input validation,
      | rate limiting, audit-event creation
      v
PostgreSQL 16 in Docker Compose

Technology Stack

Layer	Technologies
Frontend	React, React Router, Axios, CSS
Backend	Node.js, Express.js, Zod
Authentication	JWT, bcryptjs, TOTP MFA
Authorization	Role-based access control
Security	Helmet, express-rate-limit, AES-256-GCM
Database	PostgreSQL 16
Local infrastructure	Docker Compose

Local Setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js
• Docker Desktop
• Docker Compose

1. Start PostgreSQL

From the repository root:

docker compose up -d

Confirm that the database container is running:

docker compose ps

2. Configure backend environment variables

Create backend/.env with your local development values.

PORT=5000
FRONTEND_URL=http://localhost:5173
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://USERNAME:PASSWORD@localhost:5432/DATABASE_NAME
JWT_SECRET=replace-with-a-long-random-development-secret
JWT_EXPIRES_IN=15m

If your implementation uses them, also configure the required encryption-key and TOTP-secret variables. Do not commit .env files.

3. Start the backend

cd backend
npm install
npm run dev

The API should start on port 5000.

4. Start the frontend

Open a second terminal:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Open the local URL printed by Vite, typically:

http://localhost:5173

API Endpoints

Method	Endpoint	Access	Purpose
GET	/api/health	Public	API health check
POST	/api/auth/login	Public, rate-limited	Authenticate a user
GET	/api/patients?limit=10&offset=0	Authenticated role	Retrieve a bounded patient page
GET	/api/patients/:id	Authenticated role	Retrieve a patient record
GET	/api/audit-logs?limit=10&offset=0	Administrator	Retrieve a bounded audit-log page

Security Design

• JWTs are verified server-side before protected routes are served.
• RBAC middleware restricts patient and administrator functions by role.
• Patient queries use explicit database fields rather than SELECT *.
• Encrypted clinical-note storage is excluded from standard patient-list responses.
• Login attempts are rate-limited to reduce automated password-guessing attempts.
• Request bodies and pagination parameters are validated before database queries run.
• Audit events record implemented authentication, record-access, and administrative-access actions.
• The audit-log endpoint is protected on the backend, not merely hidden in the frontend.
• The frontend receives only the data required for the active view.

Validation Performed

• Verified Dockerized PostgreSQL availability through localhost:5432.
• Verified patient API queries against the actual PostgreSQL patients schema.
• Verified patient-list and audit-log pagination with bounded limit and offset values.
• Verified the dashboard and patient-detail workflows load without missing-column errors.
• Verified administrator access to audit logs.
• Verified non-administrator audit-log requests are rejected by the backend.
• Verified login, patient access, audit-log access, and UI workflows locally.

Screenshots

Screenshots use local seeded/demo data only.

Screen	Preview
Secure sign-in	Add docs/screenshots/login.png
Patient dashboard	Add docs/screenshots/dashboard.png
Patient detail	Add docs/screenshots/patient-detail.png
Admin audit logs	Add docs/screenshots/audit-logs.png

PHI and HIPAA Scope

CareBridge is designed to demonstrate HIPAA-aligned technical safeguards, including access control, authentication, audit controls, validation, encryption-oriented data handling, and minimum-necessary response design.

CareBridge is not represented as HIPAA compliant. Production healthcare deployment would require formal risk analysis, organizational policies, workforce training, physical safeguards, TLS and encrypted database connections, secure key management, backup and recovery procedures, incident-response processes, access reviews, vendor assessment, and legal/compliance validation.

Repository Safety

Never commit:

• .env files
• Database URLs, passwords, JWT secrets, encryption keys, or TOTP secrets
• node_modules
• Docker database volumes
• Real patient data or exported audit-log data