* The Roving Planet secures sensitive medical information
In movies from not-too-many decades ago, we’d see a doctor walk into a hospital room and take a clipboard from the foot of the bed. He’d ask the patient a few questions, check some instrument readings then make some notes on the chart and re-hang the clipboard. After he leaves the room, a friend of the patient would look at the clipboard but be unable to read the doctor’s handwriting. This scene could be played for either humor or bathos depending on the writer and director.
But the reality is that, all too often, the doctor’s notes were misread by other caregivers and patients were harmed (or, at least, not helped) by that misreading. Roving Planet (https://www.rovingplanet.com/) has a better way, Central Site Director.
The Roving Planet system, based on mobile information devices such as laptops, PDAs, and a facility-wide wireless network, allows doctors and other healthcare professionals to update records in real-time and maintain instant access to the information they need to provide optimal care, from the bedside to the lab to the office. The use of wireless technology enables point-of-care mobile access to medical records, lab results, clinical guidelines, and other important healthcare data not only for reading but also for updating and annotating.
OK, you say, so that’s easy. I could design that. But add to this the needs of privacy, confidentiality, and other regulatory and statutory requirements and the design is no longer so simple. Among other things, you’ll need to solve the problems of:
* How to assure network security in a wireless environment with hundreds or thousands of mobile users, applications, and information sources.
* How to control access to restricted applications and information, by user and by time and location.
* How to distribute management of users and applications to departmental or facility-specific network administrators, while maintaining centralized control of overall network policies.
* How to provide detailed network visibility and reporting, to improve troubleshooting and enhance capacity management and utilization.
* How to monitor bandwidth consumption and assign priority to critical users and applications.
* How to easily add new applications, users and user groups, and access controls to the network during run-time (i.e., without taking the network down).
* How to optimize application and network performance when running a variety of data, VoIP telephony, and video applications on a single network.
Now not all of these are identity management problems, but unless you can solve all of them then identity management isn’t going to happen. Explore the Roving Planet Web site to learn how its product handles these items.
I just want to point out one area that I was drawn to: context-based authorization.
The problem, as outlined above, is “How to control access to restricted applications and information, by user and by time and location.” Interestingly, when context-based authorization first surfaced in this newsletter (https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2003/1208id1.html) one example I used was healthcare:
In healthcare, it’s important and necessary that your primary care physician have unimpeded access to all of your health records to properly diagnose and prescribe for you. A vision specialist, though, doesn’t necessarily need to know about a broken bone you had 20 years ago. An insurance administrator, even one with a medical degree, needs only limited access to relevant details of a particular treatment in order to approve or deny payment.
Roving Planet’s Central Site Director provides dynamic firewall capabilities at each access point, enabling control of access to particular applications based on user, time, location, specific access point or any combination of these. That’s context-based authorization and it got my attention. You should check it out, also.
