Liberty Health Identity Management SIG Charter
Contents |
Description and Goals
The Health Identity Management SIG (hereafter referred to as HIM SIG) offers members an opportunity to join with other Liberty Alliance Members (regardless of membership level) to recommend standards to enable an internationally interoperable health care identity management and information exchange system. This may includes standard directory (LDAP) models, health care roles, implementation guides and similar recommendations.
The goal of this activity is to engage the broadest member participation across Liberty Alliance to facilitate adoption of Liberty protocols and specifications by the healthcare industry, worldwide.
Specific goals of this group are to:
- Review existing standards, and recommend new standards for an interoperable health care identity management system using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and Liberty Specifications
- Review and recommend a set of health care roles that can be used for role based access control requirements.
- Review and recommend directory architecture to enhance interoperability.
- Work to encourage the development of a reference implementation, using open source solutions.
- Review and recommend simple APIs that are sufficiently simple to allow multiple vendors to participate in this system
- Reach out to other appropriate groups to invite participation
- Educate the health care community on the principles of standard identity management, its goals and benefits of such a system. Work to ensure the education uses common terms, cross-referenced between “vendor-specific” concepts and Liberty standards.
- Educate the community on how the system should operate and how such a system should function.
- Contribute best practices to the appropriate Liberty Alliance Expert Groups for standardization consideration. This SIG recognizes a special need to coordinate with the Identity Assurance Special Interest Group (IASIG), the Identity Assurance Expert Group to ensure harmonization with their efforts to extend the original Trust Framework work of the EAP (Electronic Authentication Partnership), the Credential Assessment Framework of the US E-Authentication Initiative, and other industry contributions, into a harmonized, best-of-breed industry standard.
- Review and recommend adjustments to approved specifications as the system develops to ensure reliability, security and privacy.
- Work with the vendor community to ensure interoperability between systems.
Scope
The HIM SIG is chartered to:
- Provide Liberty with subject matter expertise regarding the unique identity management and regulatory challenges facing the healthcare industry.
- Become a discussion forum for identity management and interoperability of electronic health/patient records.
- Work with Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs), Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) and similar groups to recruit them into these discussions to provide the broadest possible input.
- Discuss and recommend how healthcare enterprises will deliver this functionality while meeting all regulatory obligations as set by various bodies worldwide, including the issues of patient privacy, security and patient consent issues.
- Provide an information sharing and feedback forum for Associate & Affiliate members with an interest in identity management within the healthcare industry, and to communicate core findings of the SIG to the relevant Liberty Alliance organizational entities (Expert/Services Groups, Management Board, Liberty staff).
- Where appropriate, take part in the identification and planning of healthcare industry events.
- Where appropriate, provide input to healthcare-focused Liberty activities, including, but not limited to, policy and marketing recommendations.
- To provide inputs for external communications, such as collateral materials and contributed articles.
- To provide Liberty with spokespersons on healthcare-related topics related to the Liberty role in identity management.
- To review and provided feedback on technical specifications, market requirements documentation, and business/deployment guidelines as they are released for All Participant Review to ensure that the healthcare industry requirements are being properly addressed by Liberty Alliance.
- To act as an information gathering body within Liberty that tracks significant trends in regulation affecting Healthcare IT worldwide and to feed this information back to the appropriate groups within Liberty, and where appropriate, with recommended actions (e.g. to respond to the US Government Request for Information)
Criteria for Success
- Growing participation from Sponsor, Associate, and Affiliate members.
- Visible involvement of Associate and Affiliate membership in meeting the goals of this group.
- Growth in Liberty Alliance membership from healthcare vendors and end users of federated identity and identity-based Web services.
- Growth in publicly announced deployments in the healthcare industry built on Liberty Federation and Liberty Web services specifications.
Duration
The Liberty Management Board charters the HIM SIG for five years. It may be amended from time to time, with changes approved by the Management Board. This charter will expire on January 1, 2013.
Resource Requirements
The HIM SIG requires the following support from the Liberty organization:
- Financial support for approved pilot projects.
- Support for grant writing to enable larger project activities that are grant funded.
- One or more email lists established, with archives, on the All Members pages.
- Globally available conference call facilities, with dedicated conference call number with all participant access.
- A dedicated directory in the Members Area for the sharing of documents.
- Support from Liberty staff to co-ordinate cross-organizational activities.
- An identified point of contact for each group within Liberty Alliance, including the Management Board.
- As appropriate, recognition of SIG activities and milestones by Liberty Alliance to advocate for and promote awareness of the SIG among non-Healthcare Liberty members.
Active sponsor member participants in the SIG are expected to:
- Drive and actively participate in e-mail discussions, teleconferences, and healthcare-related events.
- Represent HIM SIG contributions to Expert Groups and the Management Board.
HIM SIG Meetings
The HIM SIG will primarily communicate using the e-mail list (him-sig@projectliberty.org) and conference calls. Face-to-Face meetings will be held from time to time as determined by the SIG members in consultation with Liberty staff. The HIM SIG does not have a budget provided by the Liberty Alliance Management Board and therefore those attending must cover all costs associated with the meeting.
Membership
Membership of the Healthcare SIG requires active participation of at least two Liberty members. All members are invited to participate in all communication and activities.
