HealthKey SMG Demonstration
On March 19, 2001 five secure messaging vendors demonstrated interoperability between their respective products by securley exchanging messages between domains, encrypted using domain-level certificates. The products have been developed to accord with a specification jointly developed by the vendors, facilitated by the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium as part of the HealthKey effort. All five vendors had existing messaging gateway product, but until this demonstation they could not all interoperate successfully.
The S/MIME Gateway project was launched to ensure the confidentiality of messages sent between healthcare organizations without incurring the expense, user training, and administrative overhead of desktop-based encryption. A ground-rule of the effort was that no single-vendor solution would be appropriate, so inter-vendor cooperation was required.
The five vendors demonstrating at the HealthKey Summit were Baltimore Technologies, DICA Technologies, TFS Technology, Tumbleweed Communications, Vanguard Security Technologies.
Ben Littauer, MHDC technical lead on the project, verified the message exchange, and presented the results to attendees of the Summit.
John Halamka, CIO of CareGroup, and Dahl Gerberick, Director of Operations, Deloitte & Touche Security Services, had earlier presented the results to a general session at the summit. Dr. Halamka is the Executive Sponsor of the project, and Mr. Gerberick coordinated the testing of the products in testing labs provided by Deloitte and Touche.
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