The Health Level Seven (HL7) Clinical Context Object Workgroup (CCOW) is a vendor independent standard that uses context management. Use context management to share information across different healthcare applications.
With context management, a clinician can have access to the same clinical information stored in different healthcare applications. Examples of clinical information are the identity of a patient, identity of a user, or a particular encounter with a patient.
When a clinician logs on to one application within a group of disparate healthcare applications in CCOW, the clinician is also logged on to all the other applications within the group. Similarly, when the clinician selects a patient in one application, the same patient is selected in all the applications.
Clinical Context Object Workgroup is rapidly gaining popularity in the healthcare industry because it provides clinicians with faster access to patient records across multiple applications.
Carefx is one of the vendors that provide a CCOW-compliant context management tool called Fusionfx Context Manager (FCM). IBM® integrates its Context Management solution to provide sign-on automation to all Clinical Context Object Workgroup and non-Clinical Context Object Workgroup applications.
AccessAgent sets the IBM Security Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On user name as the user context in Carefx FCM after the user logs on to AccessAgent. Fusionfx Context Manager manages the mapping of individual application logon accounts for the user name. FCM automates the sign-on to individual Clinical Context Object Workgroup applications by using the mapped accounts.
There is no suitable authentication mechanism between AccessAgent and Fusionfx Context Manager. The Carefx Fusionfx Context Manager assumes that AccessAgent manages the user authentication before the user context is set to Fusionfx Context Manager.