Patient Privacy Authorization Addressed By Educational Initiative
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Any of your healthcare IT clients interested in addressing public concerns around privacy will want to pay attention to, and possibly participate in a new educational initiative.
The Kantara Initiative is a non-profit professional association formed to advance legal and technical innovation around identity management in digital spaces. It recently announced its collaboration with the National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) to develop a serial educational program for its stakeholders. The series is scheduled to begin in 2016 and will focus on topics including the following:
- electronic authorizations for disclosure (eConsent)
- delegation of authority
- the management of privacy preferences
According to NATE CEO Aaron Seib, “We’re excited to announce this new educational program with the Kantara Initiative and look forward to hearing feedback from the larger community. There is a great deal of interest in better understanding these emerging standards and Kantara has been leading many efforts to formalize these tools. NATE is proud to be partnered with Kantara to increase the healthcare community’s knowledge of such powerful concepts, as they will benefit both consumers and the data holders responsible for handling sensitive information on their behalf.”
According to Market Wired, Kantara Initiative’s UMA (user-managed access) open industry standard is an OAuth-based protocol which has been designed to give users a central point for authorizing access to their online data, services, and content, regardless of where that content resides online. Their minimum viable consent receipt (MVCR) project involves developing an eConsent specification that will allow organizations to consider the minimum notice requirements for the jurisdiction in question (in healthcare this could possibly be a hospital system, region, ACO, or Internet location where the consent resides) and then create and provision the record of consent.
NATE specifically sees the potential this initiative has in helping consumers managing their health formation and in simplifying information sharing overall.
According to Joni Brennan, Executive Director of the Kantara Initiative, “Kantara Initiative’s global mandate insists that we focus on delivering impactful strategies for trusted identity management solutions. With common core values and complementary missions, we are proud to collaborate with industry leaders from NATE to enable us to collectively share our diverse industry expertise to improve the delivery of healthcare services online.”
About The Organizations
The Kantara Initiative was originally founded by The Internet Society, The Liberty Alliance, The Concordia Project, The DataPortability Project, OpenLiberty.org, XDI.org, and the Information Card Foundation in 2009 as a program of IEEE-ISTO.
NATE has been involved in initiatives around healthcare interoperability, specifically the Virtual Clipboard Initiative, which you can read more about here.