IBM, Fla. university look to autonomic computing research

Computerworld - IBM and Florida International University (FIU) in Miami launched two new research projects last week involving the health care industry.
The projects will use autonomic computing, specifically policy management, to try to bolster security for patient records and reduce the time patients spend in waiting rooms, IBM and FIU officials said.
IBM will supply the university with eServer pSeries and xSeries server systems, as well as products from the IBM TotalStorage SAN Switch and IBM ThinkPad X series. IBM software included in the grant includes WebSphere Commerce Business Edition and DB2 Universal Database.
Other than listing the hardware and software being used, IBM and FIU officials would not disclose the dollar value of the award, which IBM said is part of its Shared University Research award program. The program has handed out $70 million in awards for research over the past three years, IBM officials said.
The FIU research in policy management will make use of IBM's Cortex system, according to an IBM spokeswoman. Policy management is an IBM term for autonomic computing that has self-configuring, self-healing and self-managing characteristics.
One part of the research is called "Privacy in Transit" and aims to tie patient data together with privacy policies. That way, if a patient changes doctors or moves, the status of records that are private or have been released can be altered, said Niki Pissinou, professor of computing engineering at FIU and one of the leaders on the project. The process would require a patient to give more information on when and where medical data can be used, she said.
The second major focus is designed to reduce overscheduling of hospital patient services, a problem faced by many hospitals, Pissinou said. The process would involve having a software policy engine drive patient scheduling, with the software making negotiations between various demands on facilities and patient needs. That would allow, for example, a critically ill patient to have higher priority for needed tests.