Using Emerging Open Specifications for enhancing XML Web Services to Build Maintainable and Secure Health Care Information Systems

The presentation describes the experience gained from building a SOA (service Oriented Architecture) based production health care system for the OSU (Ohio State University) Medical Center. The system uniformly treats collection of “medical actions” as generalized electronic medical records. One part of the system allows us to securely and in near real time monitor, record, and replay clinical data being generated in the 50+ ORs at the medical center. Another part of the system (currently under construction) allows patient and equipment tracking by utilizing the existing wireless infrastructure at the medical center. The presentation describes the use of emerging open specifications based on policy to enhance a federation of SOAP XML Web Services. Maintainability is enhanced because declarative security policy enables separation of security concerns from business logic. The system initially used Microsoft’s Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 implementation of WS-Policy, WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation open specifications; currently the system is being ported to Microsoft Indigo. The presentation describes patterns of using Web Services in a near real time environment and how using WSE/Indigo can significantly decreased the cost of building and maintaining a secure policy based federated system.

Speaker Details

Prof. Khan holds joint positions as an associate professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the College of Engineering, and the Department of Anesthesiology in the College of Medicine at the Ohio State University (OSU). He is also a co-director of the Collaborative for Applied Software Technology at OSU, a group formed to facilitate networking and technology/knowledge transfer within the OSU IT community, as well as central Ohio companies. His current interests include patterns for SOA (Services Based Architectures), policy based security, emerging standards for web services, applied software engineering and enterprise mission critical distributed computing. He is currently interested in enhancing “core” SOAP Web Services by using the emerging industry standard WS-* protocols (WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-Trust etc.). His team is presently using WSE (Web Services Enhancements) and recently Indigo to build novel systems for the healthcare domain based on Service Oriented Architectures. His team has also built a security infrastructure for the DOD (Wright Patterson Air force Base, Dayton, Ohio); it leverages XML web services for security, and peer to peer encrypted and secure messaging. His current projects use .NET Servers and related .NET technologies. He also has experience with the .NET Compact Framework. Prof. Khan has also conducted extensive research in theoretical as well as computational Solid State Physics. Prof. Khan is the founder of a four course Applied Software Engineering sequence for senior undergraduate and graduate students. This unique sequence is shared jointly between ECE and CSE departments. He has lectured extensively on enterprise distributed computing and security in the USA, Europe and Asia. He has strong ties with the Colleges of Engineering, Medicine and Business, as well as technology companies in the central Ohio area. Prof. Khan’s projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, Naval Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research, Air Force, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Cray Research., Lucent Technologies, and Microsoft Research.

Date:
Speakers:
Furrukh Khan
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running