HIMSIG20080201

Health Identity Management – Special Interest Group of the Liberty Alliance

Minutes of the 02.01.2008 Kick Off Conference Call

We had our kick-off call last Friday, February 1st, 2008, 10 – 11 a.m. Central, for the Health Identity Management – Special Interest Group of the Liberty Alliance. We have between 10-15 people on the call, representing SAFE BioPharma, Aetna, eHealth Ohio, SE Michigan RHIO, Colorado RHIO, the Identity Assurance Group within Liberty, National Emergency Preparedness Coordinating Council, MEDNET USA and others.

Our next call is scheduled for this coming Friday, Feb 8th, from 10-11 Central and will highlight SAFE BioPharma, and their plans for issuing digital certificates for the pharmaceutical and health care industries. Note from the first call:

On our first call, we had a welcome from Brett McDowell, Executive Director of Liberty. We completed introductions, and then get into a lot of discussion about the issuance of digital certifications and specifically, there was much interest in how and what the feds are doing. Rich Furr, from SAFE BioPharma introduced their efforts, and agreed to be the keynote for the next meeting.

Mick Talley, from University Bank, and a partner with the SE Michigan RHIO discussed the need for multiple identity proofing in addition to PKI efforts, and the need for standardized roles and players that can map to credentialing solutions.

Dan Combs, who has worked on the SAFE Team and as a GSA consultant, likes the SAFE model, and discussed the EAP and NIST policies of the feds. Rich Moore, eHealth Ohio introduced the Shibboleth project that eHealth Ohio, VMN and MEDNET are working together on, and how this should dove-tail with the federal and SAFE BioPharma efforts. Brett McDowell also indicated that Liberty has an open source initiative, see: http://www.OpenLiberty.org He also mentioned that Liberty is working on some LDAP standards that may be useful in the health care industry.

Editors notes: We’ll bring both these issues to our calls in the future.

• Housekeeping

We now have a new project Wiki and listserv. We will be putting information about projects, minutes etc, on the wiki, so please visit the wiki for that and to sign up to the mailing list:
1. http://wiki.projectliberty.org/index.php/Health_Identity_Management_SIG
2. See the wiki, under Email Information, on how to subscribe to the mailing list