EA Modeling - Healthcare
The last industry I’m going to talk about is one that has quite a few differences between the US and many other countries – healthcare. The specific difference being, of course, that healthcare provision is a for-profit business in the USA. However, it turns out that both private healthcare providers and public ones such as in Canada, generally have the same primary concern – patient records.
The medical data for a particular person is necessarily sensitive, and most developed countries have some kind of law in place protecting the medical privacy of individual patients. Over here in the USA, the law in question is the infamous HIPAA. Regardless of which law applies in a given country, the healthcare provider is required to have controls in place.
All well and good in theory, but how to accomplish it in practice?
It turns out that both the basic operation of documenting out roles, systems and data items, and which roles and systems access which data items, is extremely valuable in being able to identify and show compliance to these medical privacy regulations.
But the more high-level goals that we see with healthcare providers is to truly leverage ‘real’ enterprise architecture – in other words, real business transformation – to fully implement compliance with
So, both at the tactical and strategic level of modeling, it turns out that data access control has a prominence with healthcare providers that we don’t generally see with other industries.