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NIH streamlines public access to data, resources
By Sean Gallagher
Thursday, September 24, 2009

http://www.govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=72127


The National Institutes of Health has stepped into the forefront of a government effort to make it easier for citizens to register on agency sites and access personalized data.

Instead of maintaining an internal directory of users, NIH announced earlier this month that it will leverage the OpenID standard to allow people to register using their credentials from any of 10 companies—including Yahoo, AOL and Google accounts.

The Center for Information Technology at NIH is the pilot site for the government’s new standard for open trust networks, based on standards from the OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation.

The standards have been adopted by the Federal Identity, Credential, and Access Management Steering Committee (ICAM)—a group set up by the Federal CIO Council—as the basis for citizen access to interactive applications on government sites.

Using the OID and ICF’s standards means that government agencies like NIH can accept credentials from commercial providers who have already established networks of trust. At the lowest level, that includes social networking and information services providers like Yahoo, AOL and Google. At a higher level, it includes financial services sites like PayPal, Equifax, and Citi, and commercial service providers including Acxiom, VeriSign, Privo and Wave Systems.

Dr. Jack Jones, NIH’s chief information officer and acting director of CIT, said that the NIH Single Sign-on service will initially accept credentials as part of an ‘Open For Testing’ phase, “with full production expected within the next several weeks.”

“At that time, OpenID credentials will join those currently in use from InCommon, the higher education identity management federation, as external credentials trusted by NIH, he added.

Mike Ozburn, a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton, said the new identity management approach will simply make it easier for the public to do business online with NIH.

“NIH deals online with everybody from high school biology teachers to physicians and a global network of medical researchers,” he said. “And they have lots of different directories that they had to manage. So what they've done is use OpenID in this trust framework to provide a streamlined approach.”

NIH will use OpenID for applications ranging from grant requests down to information requests, he said. “So now instead of managing a directory of graduate students, they can come to the site and register with, say, their Yahoo ID, and interact with their community in a much friendlier, streamlined fashion.”