EHR ecosystem and privacy?
Electronic Health Records (EHR) and privacy is up in the air. The PRISM program and NSA snooping revealed by Edward Snowden at all the major US online companies has called into question privacy of our most treasured communications and records.
James Staten at Forrester Research has quantified a coming $180B dollar impact thru 2016 or a 20-25 percent hit on all US online service providers.
http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-08-14-the_cost_of_prism_will_be_larger_than_itif_projects
+ Can we architect a secure ecosystem for EHR protecting our privacy?
+ How architecture pattern so that NSA snooping is degraded?
+ How exactly can we design an app ecosystem?
Paul O'Rouke summarized the design of Salesforce.com's Internet Application Development Platform in 2008. http://ororke.com/paul/blog/the-multitenant-architecture-of-forcecom/
Force.com was already had 5+ years development at this point. In a nutshell Force.com uses an Oracle-on-an-Oracle database to obtain multitenant security and scalability for an enterprise app ecosystem.
Salesforce was reported by to have a team working on porting Force.com to HBase. Parker apparently through the towel in and Salesforce signed on for Oracle Database 12c.
12c in combination with next Java version should allow Force.com apps to remove the governor limiting performance of reports in multitenant apps. Probably cementing Force.com on Oracle for at least the next 10 years.
The NSA started building the Accumulo NoSQL database 5 years ago based on the Hadoop database file systems (HDFS) used by HBase. Yielding the Apache Accumulo open source database that Sqrrl has extended for the enterprise. In particular addressing cell-level security for multitenants at very high scale with audit-able realtime analytics suitable for HIPPA and EHR.
http://blog.sqrrl.com/post/58927082451/attribute-based-access-controls-fine-grained-security
In the bigger scheme Sqrrl is missing the vision of Benioff, Harris et al for an app ecosystem for the EHR. Someone is going to clean up here and make a fortune applying Accumulo as basis for an EHR app ecosystem. We'll discuss this next in part two of the series.