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UPMC revealed plans on Thursday to collaborate with Oracle in the development of cloud-based identity management technology to be utilized by small to mid-sized healthcare providers.

According to the article, “CloudConnect Health IT will enable healthcare users to easily manage computer accounts, including adding, modifying and terminating a user’s computer access, officials say. They’ll also help providers manage access based on the user’s job responsibility and provide self-service tools for retrieving forgotten passwords and unlocking accounts, as well as offer comprehensive management reporting.”

This poses a problem because, as Adrian Gropper, MD, points out “Proprietary identity systems risk being coercive of the patient to the extent that they allow aggregation of a patient’s records across multiple institutions without informed patient consent. Voluntary ID systems can be created that are not coercive while still offering the value of global uniqueness.”