By Mary Mosquera
Friday, January 22, 2010

The Health & Human Services Department has updated the government’s Connect software to incorporate the ability to query for a patient and to assure the identity of sender and recipient in the exchange of health data.

Connect is the federally developed software that lets agencies and healthcare organizations share health data by using the protocols, agreements and core services that comprise the nationwide health information network (NHIN).

HHS continues to improve or add more functionality to the Connect gateway software on a quarterly basis to be a model for health information exchange, according to Les Westberg, Connect’s technical lead in the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) program and an executive with Agilex.

Authentication requirements “should be in line with some of the tightest security that’s possible right now,” he said, during an online conference Jan. 19 about the latest version of Connect software. 

Authentication works hand-in-hand with the data use and reciprocal agreement (DURSA), which is a legal agreement signed by the organizations to assure a certain level of authentication, he said. The organizations communicate that authentication information with use of Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML), a standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data.

NHIN authentication services will include digital certificates to document a user’s identity has been verified, lists of those whose certification has been revoked and the ability to ask if an organization’s NHIN certification is still valid, Westberg said.

Another significant upgrade is the technical ability for Connect to be able to query if a patient is known to an exchange user. Some demographic data can accompany the query. That replaced a general notification that the system was looking for the subject, he said.

Connect also introduced a set of responses when a patient is discovered. The gateway can pass through the results of the discovery to the adapter, the interface between the healthcare organization and Connect; check the demographics first against a master patient index before passing through the information; or return the result and make a record of it

The FHA team revises Connect based on technical recommendations from the NHIN Specifications Factory, which is made up of representatives of the Office of the Nationa Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and other public and private sectors involved in health information exchange. The NHIN requirements align with the latest Health IT Standards Panel and health information exchange standards, Westberg said.

Source: http://www.govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=73030

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:09 am

of Health and Human Services will host its first “code-a-thon” dedicated to the National Health Information Network and its Connect software.

About 80 programmers, led by Apache developer (and Collabnet employee) Brian Behlendorf, will spend about four hours trying to stamp out bugs in the open source software gateway, which is based on National Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions.

Behlendorf’s presence is not ceremonial, as CollabNet runs the military’s forge.mil open source forge site.

The code-a-thon, and the resulting code, could be a great demonstration of the power of open source in dealing with big problems like health care. The participation of Behlendorf offers hope the open source movement will have a great success.

While open source code has won approval from the Obama Administration, the processes by which such code is developed have not fared as well.

While the Veterans Administration is still working with its open source VistA platform, for instance, it has placed a moratorium on accepting code from local VA facilities. Instead of developing VistA through a network of collaborators, open source IT advocate Fred Trotter writes, “it will be centrally developed by a single, controlling entity.”

The decision may improve security and manageability of the code base, but it’s also going to slow down development, and give one contract holder control of the software.

Whether Behlendorf and his code-a-thon can give U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra a little open source religion may be an open question. As Virginia CTO Chopra outsourced development work to India under a master contract signed with Northrup-Grumman which has since become highly controversial.

Are open source projects that are centrally controlled by single vendors really open source projects, or are they proprietary projects using open source as a feature? That’s a question the Obama Administration needs to answer if it’s to get full value from open source.

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

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