Automating Workflow – Is Your Private Information Still Secure?

    In February 2008, Alcatel-Lucent and Hewlett Packard (HP) announced a Joint Solution that links design time policy authoring and compliance validation of the production infrastructure with comprehensive run time policy enforcement. This Joint Solution brings together Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniAccess 8550 Web Services Gateway (WSG) with HP’s SOA Systinet governance software.
The Joint Solution is a powerful combination of expertise from HP focused on SOA security from a design time perspective and expertise from Alcatel-Lucent focused on security from a run time perspective (when the system is live and active). Delivering unique capabilities for enterprises, it ensures that the information access policy designed into their SOA applications is enforced at run time, minimizing information security risks.

The Joint Solution solves the security headache for enterprises that need to maintain strict control on access to information while automating business processes. The solution benefits organizations that require adherence to strict information privacy legislation, for example, in industries such as healthcare, government, finance and education. This is achieved without compromising the availability of information from both business critical internal systems and external business partner networks. With the Joint Solution, enterprises can provide open access to information while maintaining fine grain control at the application level, for example controlling access to individual information records.

As enterprises continue to automate more and more of their business processes, the Joint Solution:

• Provides design, development and test time environments for Web services
• Verifies corporate wide compliance: policy authored at design time is invoked at run time ensuring no room for error
• Provides run-time compliance infrastructure for Web services
• Ensures sensitive information access is secure for partners, suppliers and customers
• Ensures access to information is compliant with information privacy legislation and this compliance can be demonstrated for audit purposes
• Enables a single identity for organization wide consistent compliance
• Provides network-embedded architecture for SOA with reduced risk and cost

Further reducing the burden on IT managers, the Joint Solution provides a complete Service Oriented Architecture lifecycle approach to compliance. Business leaders and IT managers can rest assured that the system employs end-to-end best practices and complete automated compliance verification.   

Improving Patient Care for Advocate Health Care:

Advocate Heath Care, one of Chicago’s leading physician group practices has more than 190 physicians, based at many different sites, providing a wide range of medical and surgical care. 

Due to a lack of interoperability between various applications, many processes require extensive manual effort. By moving to a Service Oriented Architecture, Advocate can create new automated processes to improve efficiency.  Advocate can also reduce the cost of insurance claims processing and enable medical transcription contractors to work more efficiently by providing secure, auditable access to for users within external companies.  This can be achieved while at the same time maintaining application security and enforcing compliance with government regulations for all service and data access.

With these and other improvements in mind, Advocate is currently evaluating the Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess 8550 Web Services Gateway and intends to deploy it when available.

These are just some examples of benefits for health care providers; read more on how automated workflow can improve patient care.