Axway and Anakam to provide security and identity management offering for electronic health records

Axway, the Business Interaction Networks company, today announced a partnership with Anakam to provide a security and identity management offering for secure access and transmission of electronic health records (EHR) and personal health records (PHR). This offering enables health information exchanges, payors, and providers to easily comply with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act’s provisions for protecting electronic patient data at rest and in motion.

“For healthcare providers using EHRs, the offering from Axway and Anakam will provide comprehensive trust, state-of-the-art security, consent and privacy between a patient and provider”

The HITECH Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, provides incentives for adoption through 2014 and requires physicians to adopt EHR by 2015 or face Medicare fee reductions. In December 2009, the Center for Disease Control estimated that only 6.3 percent of office-based physicians use a fully functional electronic health record system. In the commercial healthcare marketplace and federal, state, and local governments, the transition to electronic medical records now has both the policy direction and technological capability to accelerate significantly. By offering timely secure exchange of and access to patient data, healthcare entities will improve coordinated patient care between providers, prevent data breaches, improve quality of care and drive down costs.

"Patient healthcare data is often siloed between various healthcare organizations, placing a burden on privacy and coordinated patient care,” said Taher Elgamal, chief security officer at Axway. "Through this partnership, healthcare entities will have a platform for trusted patient information storage, retrieval, transformation, and movement.”

The Axway/Anakam offering, which complies with appropriate National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS), will enable data provisioning, secure access management for records, encryption of information in motion and end-to-end EHR visibility. Additionally, its open architecture will integrate with existing identity management and application infrastructures.

The offering consists of Axway’s Validation Authority™ (VA), Secure Messenger, SecureTransport™ and Sentinel products, integrated with Anakam’s TFA® Two Factor Authentication and Anakam.IDP® Identity Proofing Offerings. Together, these technologies deliver fully-integrated identity management and data security for previously disparate processes, such as encryption, digital signatures, and patient consent management.

“For healthcare providers using EHRs, the offering from Axway and Anakam will provide comprehensive trust, state-of-the-art security, consent and privacy between a patient and provider,” said Bill Braithwaite, Anakam chief medical officer. “Our partnership provides massively scalable identity awareness with multi-factor authentication combined with the power of enterprise-class information movement, transformation, and security.”