[September 21, 2012]

Resilient Wins Nationwide Online Identity Grant

Resilient Network Systems (Resilient) has been awarded an NSTIC grant as the prime contractor building a new system that guarantees trusted identities. Resilient addresses a key technical hurdle in distributed networks, both private and public. The Resilient Trust Network allows people and organizations that don't know or trust each other to collaborate and share online resources with confidence across the Internet, while also protecting privacy and confidentiality.

President Obama initiated NSTIC to make online transactions more secure for businesses and consumers alike. Intended to foster private sector innovation, NSTIC supports the development of a voluntary identity ecosystem that offers consumers greater convenience, better privacy, and robust cyber-security protection. The grant offers an opportunity to validate the Resilient Trust Network as a breakthrough innovation that can overcome pervasive weaknesses in cyber-security.

Resilient has combined forces with a diverse ecosystem of partners to implement pilot programs that demonstrate trusted online access and coordination in healthcare, education, and entertainment. The Resilient team includes: the American Medical Association (AMA), Aetna, ActiveHealth Management, Medicity, the Kantara Initiative, LexisNexis (News - Alert), National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC), San Diego Beacon eHealth Community, Gorge Health Connect, the American College of Cardiology, NaviNet, National Laboratory for Education Transformation, Riverside Unified School District, the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, and Knowledge Factor.

"The Trust Network overcomes the traditional conflict between enabling personalization and policy enforcement while at the same time preserving privacy," said Jonathan Hare, Founder and President of Resilient Network Systems. "Education, healthcare, and online safety for children are important national priorities where traditional approaches to online security have fallen short."

The Resilient Trust Network enables unparalleled levels of security and privacy by anonymizing data and partitioning execution and policy enforcement across the network. It utilizes neutral brokers to make queries, confirm claims, and enforce policies without revealing personally identifiable information. Novel Zero Knowledge services obfuscate data so the network can virtually link, analyze, and provide access to data and online resources from different organizations and systems, while ensuring that data cannot be used for unauthorized purposes. These capabilities make it possible to simultaneously tap into a diverse network of authoritative and previously unavailable data sources to match and verify identities and to enforce policies.

NSTIC Trust Network Pilots

The NSTIC grant covers two pilots that use the Resilient Trust Network technology: Patient-Centric Coordination of Care for healthcare and Zero-Knowledge Identity and Privacy Protection Service for education and children.

The first pilot, Patient-Centric Coordination of Care, will enable convenient multi-factor, on-demand identity proofing and authentication of patients, physicians, and staff on a national scale. This will facilitate coordination of care among a select group of primary care physicians and cardiologists. It will enhance HIPAA-compliant access to electronic referrals, as well as an advanced clinical decision-support service.

Two innovative health information exchange organizations were selected as pilot sites to demonstrate cross-state and cross-software platform coordination via the Trust Network. San Diego Beacon eHealth Community is a partnership made up of UC San Diego Health System, VA San Diego Healthcare System, Sharp (News - Alert) Healthcare, Scripps Health, Kaiser Permanente, and others. Gorge Health Connect links hospitals, health centers, primary care providers, and specialists in Oregon.

"We support the work of NSTIC to go beyond using simple user IDs and passwords in an effort to accelerate progress toward improved systems for interoperable, trusted online credentials," said Brian Ahier, President of Gorge Health Connect. "Creating a fully functioning identity ecosystem within healthcare is a critical component for enabling health data exchange to scale to the national level."

"National eHealth Collaborative is excited to be a part of this very important project to develop a trusted network for identity proofing and authentication while protecting individual privacy," said Kate Berry, CEO of NeHC. "We think this will help address some of the challenges associated with health information exchange in support of patient-centered care coordination on a scalable basis."

The Trust Network will facilitate verification of doctor and staff member identities using attributes from multiple identity providers, including the AMA, NaviNet, LexisNexis, ActiveHealth, Medicity, and local directories in hospitals and clinics.

"As the nation's largest physician organization, the AMA has been in the business of collecting and verifying physician information for more than a century through the AMA Physician Masterfile," said Robert Musacchio, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Publishing and Business Services at the AMA. "Our involvement in this pilot is a natural extension of the work we've been trusted to do since 1906."

"Aetna is a strong supporter of the identity ecosystem envisioned by NSTIC, and we are pleased that ActiveHealth and Medicity will be participating with Resilient in establishing the first Trust Network to tackle patient-centered coordination of care," Mark Coderre, head of Security Architecture, Aetna. "The Trust Network will support expansion of doctors' secure access to and use of Aetna services, while enhancing protection of patients' personal health information."

The second pilot, Zero-Knowledge Identity and Privacy Protection Service, will leverage the Trust Network to coordinate interactions between parents, students, educational institutions, and media providers to address the online safety and security of children. Resilient will work with the National Laboratory for Education Transformation (NLET), Knowledge Factor, Authentify, Riverside Unified School District, King City Unified School District, and the Santa Cruz County Office of Education. Using the Trust Network, parents, children, and educators can communicate in compliance with the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The pilot will also support rights management enforcement to authorize access by parents and children to online content based on their affiliation with school districts or their family relationships. The Trust Network makes it possible to rely upon multiple authoritative sources to accurately match children with their parents and teachers, while protecting personal information from leakage.

"We strongly believe that online learning, online management of learning, and online involvement of parents is essential for education to become more equitable and effective," said Gordon Freedman, President of NLET. "As a result, we need to make a quantum leap in securing student records and online activities so that students' privacy is protected. We believe that the NSTIC pilots of the Trust Network are the first serious attempt to fortify school-related cyber-security."

About Resilient Network Systems

Resilient Network Systems, a San Francisco-based software company, has built the Resilient Trust Network to enable secure and persistent access to sensitive information by providing authentication while protecting identity and giving owners of resources control over their access and use. Resilient's clients and partners are using the Trust Network to deliver innovative solutions in a variety of industries, including healthcare, media, information security, government, and financial services.

Addendum

Quotes from Participants and Pilot Sites

"We are glad to be included in these pilots to enhance the transparency and governance of these new identity ecosystems. We look forward to seeing the Trust Network implement the NSTIC guiding principles of being privacy enhancing and voluntary; secure and resilient; interoperable; and both cost-effective and easy to use."
Joni Brennan, Executive Director of the Kantara Initiative

"The NSTIC Trust Network pilot takes a novel approach to making personalized decision support conveniently available to physicians, staff and caregivers. Such innovation promises to streamline the operation of patient-centered medical homes, Accountable Care Organizations and other new approaches that depend upon evidence-based, coordinated care."
Richard Noffsinger, CEO of ActiveHealth Management

"Patients deserve the best quality care wherever they are, this requires convenient and timely access to patient records by all of the clinicians and caregivers for each patient. Many of our patients receive care across different health systems, often in other counties or even states. We believe the Trust Network's NSTIC pilot addresses the most challenging obstacles to cost-effective patient-centered care: enabling convenient access and sharing across disparate provider organizations and IT systems, while protecting patient privacy and regulatory and policy compliance."
Dr. Ted Chan, Program Leader of the San Diego Beacon eHealth Community

"One of our primary concerns relates to maintaining access to and security of student personal and academic information across multiple networks, such as the California Open Campus. This important project represents a critical step in maintaining FERPA compliance as schools establish global connections and increase use of virtual learning and collaboration tools that are readily available to teachers, students, and parents."
Dr. Rick Miller, Superintendent of the Riverside Unified School District

"Cyber-security is a new and complex problem that we are anxious to explore on behalf of our districts, schools, parents, teachers and students. By partnering on the NSTIC pilot, I feel we can begin to work on the cyber-security issue in ways that would not be available to our schools otherwise."
Dr. Michael Watkins, Superintendent of the Santa Cruz County Office of Education

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