*Attendees*
Dave Demassa, Tufts
Morgan Passiment, AAMC
Jack Buchanan, U. Memphis
Barry Ribbeck, UT-HSCH
Bill Weems, UT-HSCH
Jere Retzer, OHSU
Paul Jolly, AAMC
Bill Gordon, U. Cincinnati
Jeanette Fielden, Internet2
Renee Frost, Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2

*Discussion*
Dave indicated that they have lost several weeks of progress on TUSK due to e-mail virus problems and the start of a new school year. He is hoping they will be ready by the end of the year for the implementation phase.

Paul discussed using the AAMC identifier in the U. Cincinnati/AAMC pilot. AAMC is having internal discussion on the regarding that the identifier is useful internally but is not ready for a nationwide deployment, which would require server-to-server communication and the ability to add people not currently in the system. Supporting server-to-server communication is important in the long run to support interaction across institutions. Currently, the consideration is for use of the AAMC identifier in a limited pilot to register people for online education. The function would be a self-service lookup of your AAMC identifier that can then be cut and pasted into another application.

People currently listed in the AAMC are medical professionals who are typically regulated by several boards. The purpose of the lookup is to have their certifications linked to them in a way that can be uniquely identified. For people in roles such as a lab technician there is no driving interest to have the AAMC provide them with an identifier since they aren't subject to the same regulations or have as many practice affiliations.

There are some physicians and residents currently not in the system. The majority are included since AAMC started assigning numbers in 1970 to U.S. medical school graduates. Not everyone in the system is an M.D. since it includes institution staff such as dean's office, program directors, etc. Since including all medical faculty is desired, faculty who have a Ph.D but not an M.D will need to be added. So the question is not how to add people as much as how big to make the database to accommodate the additions. The conclusion was that there would only be a few hundred people who need to be added for the pilot, so that doesn't exceed the system's current capacity to add several hundred a day.

One thing to emphasize is the AAMC identifier is used for identification only and not for any kind of authentication or authorization. It is strictly an internal identifier. The person still has to log on through a login/password sequence that will eventually include a biometric component. No one would be able to steal an identity by knowing an AAMC identifier. This distinction will need to be carefully explained and emphasized to people.

Implementing multi-institutional authentication, which involves Shibboleth, has become a critical part of the U. Cincinnati/AAMC trial and is crucial to have in place by February 2004 so they can expand to local affiliates. Initially it is a pilot with a few institutions based on handshakes. There have not been any considerations of federation participation at present though down the road there might be.

Renee mentioned that a tutorial is scheduled for the day before the Internet2 member meeting starts. The purpose of the tutorial is to talk about: what's a federation, what is the higher education federation InCommon, and what might be required to start a federation since a number of states and organizations are interested in creating their own federations to meet interests and needs other than higher education. It is a separate registration from the member meeting.
[AI] Once it's available the URL for the tutorial will be forwarded to the list.

It's not clear whether a separate federation might be needed for the medical space in addition to InCommon, the higher education federation, but it's a good area for discussion. There may be a need in the research arena to manage access based on complex roles and intellectual property rights. There is information about federations at FOO – the federating organizations organization.
http://middleware.internet2.edu/foo
Work done around the issue of Federated Digital Rights Management is available at:http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july02/martin/07martin.html

Internet2 Fall Member Meeting session: Jack will provide the introduction, Dave will talk about TUSK, Bill Gordon the U. Cincinnati/AAMC pilot, Barry UT-HSCH activities, and Keith Hazelton will discuss Shibboleth and possibly activities at U. Wisconsin.

Jack announced that HL7 is meeting in Memphis next week to have a discussion and possibly a vote on a draft standard for a trial use of an electronic health record. This has the potential to be a framework for an electronic health record that could be incorporated into middleware work. Information on the initiative is available at: http://www.hl7.org/ehr/ and http://www.ehrcollaborative.org/.
[AI] Jack will attend the meeting and update MedMid on what happens.