HIPAA Compliant HIS in J2EE Environment

This article presents the design and architecture of a health information system that takes into account various requirements posed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). The recommendations made, primarily address Health Care Provider and Health Plans’ needs. It introduces the reader to common HIPAA terminology, then picks a specific enterprise technology stack, i.e. Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and delves into some of its relevant artifacts. The article makes recommendations for tools, techniques and design guidelines to facilitate the architecture of a HIPAA compatible information system. We focus primarily on Health-care Providers and a subset of Health Plans. These entities have one thing in common: they process or store health information, hence they fall under HIPAA's purview. The architecture model that we are proposing will attempt to present a unified security model (e.g. security in client, application and database layers).