EnterSpace Security Suite™ for Healthcare — Providers, Services, Equipment and Pharmaceuticals

Run-time security decisioning including authentication support, coarse-to-fine-grained authorization, and federated attribute retrieval: improve access & security at the SAME time.

In the drive to improve patient satisfaction, increase efficiencies and lower administrative costs; healthcare organizations are moving to expose an ever increasing number of applications to end-users over the web — from explanations of benefits, to bills, to patient records and lab results. Generally, these systems were never designed for Internet-sized user populations. Coupled with this need to provide distributed access management to systems, are state and federal regulatory requirements; especially those mandated by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act/ in the pharmaceutical industry 21 CFR Part 11), for ensuring patient security/ privacy and requirements for e-records. Thus, as more and more systems need to be accessed by an increasing number of users, every transaction must be audited and logged. Given these present day realities in healthcare, a new enterprise tool is needed for next generation access management and authorization. The EnterSpace Security Suite is this tool.

Every Request for a Secured Resource Is Individually Authorized While many solutions exist within the access management and authorization space for the healthcare industry, most lack true real-time functionality. Those who need-to-know are identified statically and saved in an access-control-list (ACL) by a human administrator. The result is that the security model is only as current as the ACL, leading to coarse or poorly controlled security models and holes in the enterprise's security posture. As user community size increases and the number of secured resources under management continues to grow, maintenance of ACLs becomes progressively more prohibitive.

Many organizations have responded by “batching” updates to the ACL to minimize the volatility, but unfortunately this means that security decisions are only as accurate as the ACL is current. Traditional ACL driven models are inherently out of date, in that what is being saved is the RESULT of a security policy being applied to user-specific information. Therefore, the ACL is only as current as the moment it was created. The inability of this model to provide security implementations that accurately reflect “right-now” information has prevented the healthcare industry from sharing with patients, employees, partners and vendors all the information they might have a legitimate need-to-know — in effect, it has built walls that limit relationships and productivity. The EnterSpace Security Suite makes a real-time decision for every request to allow fine-grained, context-sensitive access decisions that are based upon CURRENT user information and security policies. It is time to tear down the walls between the enterprise and its users.

For Example — Every Healthcare organization is grappling with the implications of HIPAA. At the end of the day, the security and privacy regulations of HIPAA mandate that patient information remain confidential; never exposed to anyone without a legitimate need-to-know. Also, the Act requires that measures be taken to track and audit who has accessed the patient’s information, and that the confidentiality of the information be protected by encryption technologies whenever the information is transmitted over an unsecured network, such as the Internet. This presents a dilemma — optimal care is provided when everyone associated with the case has access to all the information about the patient's needs and condition, but patient confidentiality requirements require restricting that information based upon necessity. Access can be greatly facilitated by technologies such as the Internet, but must be implemented in such a way as to not expose the patient’s information to outsiders. In addition, given the nature of healthcare; need-to-know is a highly volatile list of people — it potentially changes each time a patient’s condition or treatment changes, each time a health care professional changes cases or roles, or even when a healthcare professional comes on or off shift. The results of denying access to critical information in an emergency could be catastrophic for the patient, but the requirements of protecting confidentiality are always present.

This is where Jericho Systems’ EnterSpace Security Suite delivers value. The tool's advanced rules-based decisioning engine enables the healthcare information technology professional to capture and codify the policies that are used to determine WHO should be granted access to WHAT information, and the conditions under which the access should be permitted. These policies can be associated with entire categories of resources such as all medical images (X-rays, MRI’s, etc.), or right down to individual items associated with a specific patient. In most cases HIPAA compliance can be accomplished with fairly broad categories, but the ability to refine the policies for exceptional cases is provided.
The real power of this model is that rather than saving a list of those who are permitted access, the EnterSpace Security Suite saves the policy by which the members of that list are determined — and re-evaluates a requestor’s eligibility to be granted access upon each request. This means that as the situation, patients and personnel change, the access policies control who is granted access. This is done without having to maintain highly volatile access control lists for secured resources. This also permits the system to be sensitive to highly dynamic items such as patient condition and on-duty personnel — items which traditional security models have not been able to address.

Security Policies Centrally and Easily Administered; Enterprise-Wide — With Jericho Systems, security is a function brought to the enterprise level. Currently, security is managed on an application-by-application basis. From the ground up, the EnterSpace Security Suite is built for distributed administration of the security policies, allowing the owners of the resources being managed to directly control the policies defining access throughout the enterprise. This is a substantial change from traditional security models, where access controls are maintained both by the programmers who implement the code that checks the ACL, and by the security groups who maintain the ACLs themselves. The requirements of the resource owners are thus at least two steps removed from the decision, and the ability to effect change in the security policy is frequently inhibited by programmer availability. With our software tool, policy changes can be implemented by the resource owners directly, in real-time, and will be reflected upon the very next request for the secured resource. In addition, the GUI for the management of security policies is built for the non-technical, but business-savvy administrator.

Quickly Leverage Current Enterprise Investments for Increased Security Functionality — The EnterSpace Security Suite is designed to quickly integrate with previously deployed technologies including; identity management and authentication mechanisms.

Secure, Detailed Logs Provide Single-Point Auditability — Each time a request is made, the EnterSpace Security Suite writes a detailed event log to a repository. This log contains ALL the information relevant to the decision, including the identity of the requestor, the resource the requestor tried to access, the version of the policy used to determine whether to grant the request, any/all data values used in making the decision and the resulting decision itself. This log can be written to almost any storage form, including WORM (Write Once, Read Many) devices for non-changeable audit logs, or a database for handling reporting and ad-hoc queries.

Real-Time Alarms Allow “Right-Now” Response to Inappropriate Requests — When a request is denied for any reason, the EnterSpace Security Suite provides a mechanism whereby an alarm condition may be delivered to a system responsible for notifying individuals or components to respond to the event. For example, assume an employee is attempting to access a secured resource that is highly sensitive: sensitive enough that any denied request should initiate an alarm. Within the tool’s security policy definition process, an option is available to cause an alarm condition to be raised upon denial. At run-time, when the user’s access attempt is denied, the EnterSpace Security Suite generates an alarm message which details the user’s identity, the resource requested, and the reasons for the denial; then delivers it to a system of your choice. This might be an SNMP interface to an enterprise management console, an alert to a paging system, or any other form of electronic notification.

Collaboration — While information has long been perceived as having value within the business environment, the true value is actually in the services and products that can be derived from it. And in order to do that, information must be shared among all the people and systems that have a part to play in bringing those services/ products to life. This collaborative process has been limited severely in the past by the inability to share information freely among the participants while maintaining security of the data itself. Like water in a lake, your data has enormous potential. The water realizes that potential when it is put into motion to create energy. By enabling the sharing of information securely, the EnterSpace Security Suite helps put your data into motion to create business value.

TO SUMMARIZE: With the EnterSpace Security Suite, Healthcare Organizations Gain Numerous Solutions; Including:

• Real-Time Access Management with Sensitivity to the Decision Context — As every request for access causes the evaluation of the appropriate security policy against user and situational attributes; fluid conditions like current patient condition, time-of-day, strength of authentication, assigned work schedule, etc., can be factored into access management polices.
• Create, Modify and Implement Enterprise Security Policies in Seconds — Security policies are managed by a common infrastructure and immediately affect the entire user community.
• Consistent Security Policy Evaluation, Enterprise-Wide — For secured resources under management by the software tool, the human element is eliminated from the evaluation process to improve security and reduce administrative costs.
• Distribute Security Policy Administration to Subject-Matter-Experts — Whoever owns the resource (application, function within an application, physical door, etc.) can administer the security policy for the resource without the need of software engineers.
• Flexible and Scaleable — While the EnterSpace Security Suite is built to work at the enterprise level; the tool's deployment can be limited to areas where current security models are ineffective or costly. This allows for quick and flexible impact. Pick the lowest hanging fruit first; then scale as needed. Resources that function well with existing security models can work side-by-side with resources that make use of the Suite for access management and authorization.
• Single Point Auditability — A secure event log captures information about the entire session, forming a single point for auditability and HIPAA compliance purposes.
• Generate Alarms and Alerts at the Time of Attempted Violation — No need to parse through log files to find security breaches.
• Web Services Security, Single-Sign-On and Single-Sign-Out — One tool for an enterprise solution.
• Access Portals for Secured Interactive Environments and Self-Care — Controlled, 1-to-1 access portals are quickly enabled.
• Physical Security Management — The tool can also be used to manage physical security with the same consistent, rules-based infrastructure.

Healthcare Organizations’ ROI in Jericho Systems is Derived from:

• Increased Security, Access, Collaboration and REVENUE — through real-time authorization deriving permissions and entitlements at run-time increasing functionality and results.
• Decreased Costs — through minimized administration of security; lessen the administrative burden of security polices, access control lists, user groups and security audits.
• Decreased Costs — through increased productivity brought about by single-point auditability and real-time alarms and alerts.
• Decreased Costs — from dramatically improved collaboration and self-care functionality.
• Decreased Costs — of software engineering. Externalizing security decisioning to a callable network service can drastically reduce code bases and thereby application development cycle times.

The EnterSpace Security Suite can perform hundreds of thousands of authorization decisions per second, for user communities and resources (items to be secured) in the tens-of-millions, in a real-time, parallel scaling, fault-tolerant environment.