ITL FOCUSES ON HEALTHCARE INTEROPERABILITY

On October 18-19, 2006, NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory, the Department of Commerce’s Technology Administration, and the Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST) cosponsored a major National Summit on Moving Towards Interoperability: Affordable, Accessible Healthcare. The summit brought together a diverse group of stakeholders dedicated to reaching the vision of a connected home environment where healthcare devices are interoperable with home and consumer appliances, providing the tools for patient-centric healthcare and wellness. The achievement of this vision will facilitate quality, cost-effective healthcare delivery to an aging national population and will improve the capability to manage chronic medical conditions, enabling enumerable benefits to the U.S. population and to the economy.

Keynote speakers Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Michael Leavitt and Intel Chairman Craig Barrett presented powerful messages about the immediate need for greater adoption of information technology within the healthcare sector. Secretary Leavitt talked about the President’s initiatives in this area and how HHS is addressing these issues within the Office of the National Coordinator, where efforts are under way to bring about a nationwide implementation of an interoperable health information technology infrastructure to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare and the ability of consumers to manage their care and safety. Many of these efforts are focused on gaining input, involvement, and acceptance by the private sector. The Secretary explained how the federally chartered advisory committee he chairs, the American Health Information Community, provides input and recommendations to HHS on how to make health records digital, interoperable, and secure, and to accomplish this in a smooth, market-led way.

The second keynoter, Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel, stated strongly that it is time for a rapid, systemic change in healthcare delivery. Barrett believes that collaborative systems, which are composed of personalized sensors and software converging through wireless Internet capabilities, are not far off. Adoption by the broad community of stakeholders of a set of interoperability standards could go a long way in advancing this agenda. Continua Health Alliance, a recently formed nonprofit organization comprised of technology, medical device, and healthcare industry leaders including Intel, IBM, Dell, Cisco, Roche, Pfizer, and a number of other companies in these domains, is poised to take on that challenge. Continua member companies will select connectivity standards, publish guidelines for interoperability, and establish a certification program to provide assurances of interoperability with other certified products.

In spite of diverse approaches to address the challenges of a connected healthcare system, all agreed that present conditions in our healthcare system were driving the need. Americans are living longer, costs of healthcare are increasing, and quality of care across the population is inconsistent. Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology Robert Cresanti stressed the fact that with people living longer, there will be a demographic tidal wave swelling the ranks of the elderly in America from 12.5 percent today to 18.8 percent in 2025, a 50 percent increase. Unfortunately, older people have more chronic conditions and consume a greater proportion of healthcare resources. Cresanti sees the entrepreneurial strengths in this country as a resource of technical solutions and understands that the Department of Commerce’s Technology Administration has a role in serving as an analytical forum for the technology community and government. In fact, the general theme of the summit was the recognition of the need for a public-private partnership to overcome obstacles to attaining the vision of a connected, quality healthcare delivery network.

ITL is an important contributor toward efforts for overcoming these obstacles through collaboration with industry, standards organizations, consortia, and government agencies to build tools and prototypes that can promote adoption of information technologies within healthcare systems. Collaborations with Health Level 7 (HL7) have led to the development of tools that help ensure that HL7 messaging and electronic health record (EHR) systems’ conformance can be defined and measured at an appropriate level. Through collaborations with the ‘Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise’ (IHE) project sponsored by the Radiological Society of North America, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), ITL developed an approach called Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) that will help ensure clinical document discovery and retrieval.

For the advancement of interoperability among medical devices, ITL is collaborating with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Medical Device Communications work group and the IHE Patient Care Device project, sponsored by IHE and the American College of Clinical Engineering. The goal is to develop conformance tests and associated tools that facilitate the development and adoption of standards for communicating medical device data throughout the healthcare enterprise as well as integrating it into the EHR. ITL’s ongoing collaborations with healthcare informatics-related enterprises such as the American National Standards Institute Health Informatics Standards Board, HL7, HIMSS, the American Telemedicine Association, and the Federal Health Architecture's Consolidated Health Informatics committee demonstrate ITL’s continuing commitment to advance health information technologies. The National Summit website is http://www.itl.nist.gov/Healthcare%20Summit/index.htm.

Significant New Version of OOF Materials Modeling System Released

ITL and NIST’s Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory recently released version 2 of OOF, a computer program that analyzes the properties of materials with complicated microstructures. A material's microstructure is its microscopic arrangement of regions with different atomic structures, compositions, or orientations. By performing computer simulations based on images of actual microstructures, OOF allows researchers to investigate the relationship between microscopic geometry and macroscopic behavior.

The name OOF stands for Object Oriented Finite elements, referring to the computational and mathematical techniques that the program employs. The first version of OOF was released in 1998 and was named one of 25 Technologies of the Year by Industry Week magazine. OOF2 is a complete rewrite of OOF1. It addresses a much wider range of physical problems and uses a more powerful set of mathematical tools. One of OOF2's greatest strengths is its extendibility; users can easily add fields (e.g., temperature), equations (e.g., the force balance equation), and material properties (e.g., elastic modulus). As currently distributed on the web, version 2.0.0 can solve elasticity, thermal conductivity, and piezoelectricity problems. Users at Purdue University have already added a thermo-electricity extension, and it is hoped and expected that users will continue to create and share OOF2 extension modules.

OOF2 can be obtained at http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/oof/oof2.html. It can be freely downloaded and redistributed. For more information, e-mail Stephen Langer at stephen.langer@nist.gov.

Attention, Managers! New Information Security Handbook Available

ITL recently published NIST Special Publication 800-100, Information Security Handbook: A Guide for Managers, Recommendations of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, by Pauline Bowen, Joan Hash, and Mark Wilson. The handbook provides a broad overview of information security program elements to assist managers in understanding how to establish and implement an information security program. Since the guidance is not specific to a particular organization, agencies should tailor the guidance according to their security posture and business requirements. The guideline has been prepared for use by federal agencies, but may be used by nongovernmental agencies on a voluntary basis. The document is available at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-100/sp800-100.pdf.

UPDATE ON NEW PUBLICATIONS

Our list of selected new publications, available online, features work in text retrieval, media sanitization, forensic techniques in incident response, and our Healthcare Standards Landscape.

The Fourteenth Text REtrieval Conference Proceedings (TREC 2005)

Ellen Voorhees and Lori Buckland, Editors

NIST Special Publication 500-266

October 2006

http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec14/t14_proceedings.html

This report constitutes the proceedings of the Fourteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2005) held in Gaithersburg, Maryland, November 15-18, 2005. The conference was co-sponsored by NIST, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA).

Guidelines for Media Sanitization

By Richard Kissel, Matthew Scholl, Steven Skolochenko, and Xing Li

NIST Special Publication 800-88

August 2006

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/SP800-88_Aug2006.pdf

When storage media are transferred, become obsolete, or are no longer usable or required by an information system, it is important to ensure that residual magnetic, optical, electrical, or other representation of data that has been deleted is not easily recoverable. Sanitization refers to the general process of removing data from storage media, such that there is reasonable assurance that the data may not be easily retrieved and reconstructed. This guide will assist organizations and system owners in making practical sanitization decisions based on the level of confidentiality of their information.

Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response

By Karen Kent, Suzanne Chevalier, Tim Grance, and Hung Dang

NIST Special Publication 800-86

August 2006

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-86/SP800-86.pdf

This publication is intended to help organizations in investigating computer security incidents and troubleshooting some IT operational problems by providing practical guidance on performing computer and network forensics. Specifically, the document describes the processes for performing effective forensics activities and provides advice regarding different data sources, including files, operating systems, network traffic, and applications.

Healthcare Standards Landscape Users Guide

By Elizabeth Fong, Roy Morgan, Thomas Rhodes, and Clement Ridoret

NISTIR 7329

May 2006

http://hcsl.sdct.nist.gov:8080/hcsl/index.html

The Healthcare Standards Landscape website is a project to develop and demonstrate a web-based repository of information (called the “Landscape”) on healthcare and related standards. This guide describes how to access the website and retrieve information on healthcare standards, their development organization(s), organizations adopting and using these standards, vendors and tools, conformance information, and other relevant healthcare standards information.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS

Plenary Meeting of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee

Dates: December 4-5, 2006

Place: NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland

Sponsors: U.S. Election Assistance Commission and NIST

The purpose of this conference is to review and approve draft documents as the bases for recommendations for future voluntary voting system guidelines, acting in the public interest to assist the Executive Director of the Election Assistance Commission. The target audience is the election community, and topics include human factors and privacy, security and transparency, and core requirements and testing.

NIST contact: Allan Eustis, 301 975-5099, allan.eustis@nist.gov

Conference website: http://vote.nist.gov/meeting20061204-sunshine.htm

Advancing Telemedicine: Next Steps Toward Standards and Interoperability

Date: December 13, 2006

Place: National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

Sponsors: NIST, American Telemedicine Association, and National Library of Medicine

Telemedicine has the potential for tremendous impact on accessibility, quality, and cost of healthcare – affordable care anywhere and anytime. Continued advancement and application of telemedicine is, however, dependent on implementation of appropriate technical, clinical, and administrative guidelines. The American Telemedicine Association and its members have defined five initial use case/clinical application priorities: teledermatology, home telehealth, telemental health, ocular telehealth
and telepathology. In order to advance these applications of telemedicine and to accelerate their acceptance, there must be an action plan to address the technical and standards issues.

NIST contact: Kamie Roberts, 301 975-2982, kroberts@nist.gov

Conference website: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/confpage/061213.htm

20^th Annual Federal Information Systems Security Educators’ Association (FISSEA) Conference

Dates: March 12-13, 2007

Place: North Bethesda, Maryland

Sponsors: NIST and FISSEA

With a theme of “Looking Forward…Securing Today,” FISSEA 2007 is the national forum for government, industry, and academic managers, educators, and researchers involved with security awareness, training, and education. The program will span a wide range of information security topics such as awareness programs, training programs, management of information security programs and personnel, information security and assurance curriculums, organizational behavior, security labs, certification, compliance, regulations, and supporting and emerging technologies.

NIST contact: Peggy Himes, 301 975-2489, peggy.himes@nist.gov

Conference website: http://csrc.nist.gov/fissea

6th Annual PKI R&D Workshop: Applications-Driven PKI (It’s the Apps, Stupid!)
Dates: April 17-19, 2007
Place: NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland
Sponsors: NIST, NIH and Internet 2, in cooperation with OASIS

This workshop considers the full range of public key technology used for security decisions and supporting functionalities, including authentication, authorization, identity management, federation, and trust. This year's focus is striking the proper balance to permit users to complete tasks requiring security easily while exposing the appropriate security details through all layers of software.

NIST contact: Tim Polk, 301 975-3348, tim.polk@nist.gov

Conference website: http://middleware.internet2.edu/pki07/

Disclaimer: Any mention of commercial products or reference to commercial organizations is for information only; it does not imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology nor does it imply that the products mentioned are necessarily the best available for the purpose.