XDI : Best Practice for Healthcare Federation

2/2/12
XDI technology promises to solve several critical data federation challenges–security, inter-operability, and portability. By adopting XDI, cloud service providers could enable information to be made available more seamlessly to the people who need it, while allowing individuals to maintain a high level of control concerning access to the data. Neil McEvoy, an identity and personal data expert who is starting a new Kantara Initiative working group on Cloud Identity Best Practices, encouraged me to write a white paper on how data federation could be applied to use cases in the healthcare industry. He writes in his blog that technical standards will be critically important in healthcare because “these are the means by which patient record data is exchanged between different systems”

In the diagram above, using XDI, the patient would be able to view information from the health institution, create a local copy of the information, and share the information with his doctor by allowing access either to his personal data store, or authorizing the doctor to access the information directly from the health institution.

If XDI is secure enough for healthcare, it will be secure enough for lower value transactions like social networking and Internet messaging. The next goal for the Canada Healthcare project is to figure out how XDI could be used to map existing standards like HL7.