Jericho Systems selected to provide key components of NHIN

Jericho Systems Corporation, a leader in distributed enterprise identity and access management solutions for evolving SOA environments, is one of only eight civilian companies selected to provide key components of the new Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) that facilitates the exchange of clinical data between the Department of Defense (DoD), Veterans Administration (VA), and private healthcare providers.

“Patients will benefit from the improved quality and efficiency of electronic health records, while enjoying the added peace-of-mind of knowing and approving exactly who has access to which portions of their personal medical information.”

In April 2009, President Obama tasked the DoD and VA with creating a fully interoperable Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) system and announced that the VLER "will ultimately contain administrative and medical information from the day an individual enters military service throughout their military career and after they leave the military."

The VLER is being implemented using NHIN standards and functionality. Jericho's Policy Decision Point (PDP), part of Jericho's EnterSpace Decisioning Service, is a key component of the NHIN architecture. The PDP captures all of the fine-grained rules and policies needed to manage not only overall security, but also personal privacy preferences and patient consent directives. Serving as a real-time central access control engine, the PDP makes decisions to either authorize or deny every request for the exchange of patient clinical data at any level. This revolutionizes the control of medical records as well as the security within each medical record. Previously, the medical community had sole responsibility; it can now be shared directly with the patient.

"Basing the VLER on NHIN technologies and standards will allow the VA and DoD to partner with private health care providers and other Federal agencies to promote faster, better and safer care," said Brynn Mow, CEO of Jericho Systems Corporation. "Patients will benefit from the improved quality and efficiency of electronic health records, while enjoying the added peace-of-mind of knowing and approving exactly who has access to which portions of their personal medical information."

The VA is already successfully exchanging electronic health record (EHR) information in a pilot program between the VA's medical center in San Diego and a local Kaiser Permanente hospital. The DoD also joined this pilot, and it is expected that by the end of 2010 approximately a dozen entities will be securely sharing live health information as part of the operational NHIN.