HARTFORD, CT – Liberty Alliance has recognized Aetna’s provider portal for its deployment of secure identity-based applications for the proper authentication of clinicians and staff accessing healthcare data.

The partnership between Aetna and NaviMedix, its IT platform vendor, shows increased payer reliance on identity management technologies and the federation of those technologies, said Roger Sullivan, president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and vice president of Oracle’s Identity Management.

Liberty Alliance, comprising vendors, enterprise customers and government entities, focuses on best practices in creating a secure identity-based ecosystem and building interoperable test programs and framework.

“Several years of our own experience in point-to-point federations has highlighted a need for more comprehensive multi-party standards on which Liberty Alliance is focused,” said Mark Coderre, head of Aetna Security Architecture.

“The multi-party federations allow entities to engage and work together, and we believe this type of technology and framework is required to meet the needs of the healthcare system,” he said.

Chere Parton, head of Aetna Provider eSolutions, said Aetna wanted to give providers increased HIPAA-compliant security options to let them define access within Aetna’s secure provider Web site for different users and customize registrants’ experience.

“We achieved this goal by combining Aetna’s proven authorization capabilities with NaviMedix’s identification capabilities,” she said.