Secure Web-Based Sharing of Health Information Services Using Ad-Hoc Dynamic Coalitions

Today, there is an increasing need for health-coalitions to handle situations such as the outbreak of diseases, earthquakes, or tsunamis throughout the world. Such situations arise most unexpectedly and need a rapid formation and deployment of a coalition of agencies to handle the situation. Interaction between coalition members (software systems) can be done using Web services over the ubiquitous Internet. The coalition members securely share the information resources of the individual members. Absence of a means to guarantee such security, especially when interacting over the public Internet, prevents organizations from joining the coalitions. In this paper, we summarize the results of our work in building a prototype of health services coalition system. Our system offers confidentiality and integrity to all the participating members and the services they share by using secure web services. It employs a secure coalition service registry (CSR) for member organizations to register the services that they wish to share. It ensures that only authenticated members access the coalition. Finally, we describe the prototype and possible extensions to the work.