OASIS demonstrates health care IT privacy standards in a multivendor interoperability demo at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Chicago.
OASIS demonstrated implementation of health care privacy standards in a
multivendor interoperability demo at the
HIMSS (Healthcare Information and
Management Systems Society) conference in Chicago held April 4 to 8.
The demonstration, which is part of the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase, is
hosted by OASIS, the international open standards consortium, in cooperation
with the HITSP (Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel).
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Sun Microsystems, Jericho Systems, Red Hat, the Department of Defense and
the Department of Veterans Affairs all collaborated to implement health care
scenarios in the demonstration, which implements privacy consents and access
control standards recognized by the Department of Health and Human Services for
the secure electronic exchange of health care information.
The standards involved include SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)
and XACML (Extensible Access Control Markup Language) and are part of the XSPA (Cross-Enterprise
Security and Privacy Authorization) profile, which is currently being defined
at OASIS, officials of the standards body said.
According to the committee's Web page on the
OASIS Website:
The OASIS XSPA Technical Committee
works to standardize the way healthcare providers, hospitals, pharmacies, and
insurance companies exchange privacy policies, consent directives, and
authorizations within and between healthcare organizations.
OASIS said in a news release April 4:
"The advanced technologies
demonstrated by OASIS and HITSP at HIMSS09 show how standards and technologies
that have been approved by the U.S. Secretary, Health and Human Services can
come together with vendors and providers to meet the Nation's healthcare interoperability
requirements for security and patient privacy," said John 'Mike' Davis,
Standards Security Architect, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Speaking out in support of XSPA, Bill Vass, president and chief operating
officer of Sun Microsystems, said, "The Nationwide Health Information
Network ... is the poster child for all of the benefits that open-source software
and open standards provide. The federal government has built a working
prototype capable of being deployed across multiple agencies in a matter of
months with minimal costs. The open nature of the IT foundation is critical to
ensuring that government can work with the private health care sector to
revolutionize the nation's health care system."
According to the OASIS release, "The demo depicts real-world, critical
health care scenarios including clinician-asserted rights, purpose-based access
([such as] emergency access), patient-determined privacy preferences and
consent directives, and flexible policy management.
Anil Saldhana, lead security architect of Red Hat's JBoss Division, said in
the release: "As a leader in open source, we are committed to adoption of
OASIS security standards, and we support industry interoperability efforts
surrounding them. We are eager to showcase the applicability of standards and
open-source technology to enable privacy and secure transmission in e-health care.
The current demonstration allows Red Hat and our partners to show the power of
open source and collaboration."
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