Use cases target children to seniors
15 January, 2013
category: Digital ID, Government, Library
Resilient Network Systems
Resilient Network was awarded almost $2 million for two pilots, one in health care and another in education. In health care the company will seek to demonstrate that sensitive health transactions on the Internet can earn patient trust by using encryption technology, on-demand identity proofing and multifactor authentication.
Resilient will partner with the American Medical Association, Aetna, the American College of Cardiology, ActiveHealth Management, Medicity, LexisNexis, NaviNet, the San Diego Beacon eHealth Community, Gorge Health Connect, the Kantara Initiative and the National eHealth Collaborative.
In the education sector, Resilient will demonstrate secure access to resources as required by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Partners for this pilot include the National Laboratory for Education Transformation, LexisNexis, Neustar, Knowledge Factor, Authentify, Riverside Unified School District, Santa Cruz County Office of Education and the Kantara Initiative. The goal is to provide secure, but privacy-enhancing verification of children, parents, teachers and staff, as well as verification of parent-child relationships.
Resilient builds software that brings three things to the Internet, sys Pat Reilly, executive vice president of business development at Resilient. “First, we bring the concept of identity, so that when someone is there we can verify that they are indeed the person that they are attempting to portray,” he explains.
Second, Resilient enables owners of services, databases and information to set up policies governing what type of individual can access what resources. “This is all about policy on the Internet which really doesn’t exist well today,” Reilly says.
Finally, Resilient can obfuscate all of that as well. “Rather than actually letting folks know who someone is, we only let them know that this is indeed a person that meets the policy set by the organization … so we enable privacy for those that don’t want to give out personal information across the Web,” Reilly says.
With the grants Resilient will create a team to tackle both areas and build use cases. In health care this means bringing together physicians, insurers, health information exchanges and others. The first use case involves making sure records can be located when a patient walks in the front door, no matter what physician the patient had seen.
“Once we have those records from that individual, how can we begin to help give them some coordinated care?” Reilly asks. “How can we share some of the expertise that others have regarding this kind of patient?”
There are two things that Resilient is trying to do on the child safety front, Reilly says. “One is to prove a child is a child, that he or she belongs to a school and that as the parent of that child, I can get records online,” he explains.
To do this Resilient partners with the organizations that help manage school information and companies that run media content distribution. This will enable parents to go online and get information from the school but also set up a system for their child so that they can access only appropriate information.
This may sound like a simple use case, but that there are a lot of steps that someone must go through to do this today. “Behind the scenes the network will take care of it versus having somebody call people, get somebody else to attest to it, then fax something and sign something,” Reilly says. “We want to use a trusted identity ecosystem to manage all of that.”
What lies ahead?
The next 24 months will be telling as five pilot leads and 30 companies attempt to prove different aspects of the identity ecosystem.
And still more pilots are likely on the horizon, says Grant, head of the NSTIC Program Office. Federal agencies may use their own budgets to set up systems that would work with the national strategy. The program office is also hoping to fund additional pilots once the 2013 federal budget is settled.
As the organizations deploy systems to make it easier to use high-assurance identities online the amorphous identity ecosystem should become more defined.
Gina Jordan, Contributing Editor, AVISIAN Publications also contributed to this article