NHS knowledge base goes for single sign-on

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The National Health Service (NHS) National Library for Health (NLH) has signed a five-year agreement for the provision of single sign-on access to a series of online information resources.

The NLH, which is part of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, provides access to reference materials, full-text journals, key clinical databases and eBooks to more than 257,000 NHS staff and placement students in England via the NLH portal.

In addition to NLH's resources, NHS workers across England are able to access web services such as journals and databases that their own NHS trust subscribes to, as well as local and national news items.

Ian McKinnell, NLH head of development told IT PRO these resources are critical in helping doctors, nurses, students, health managers and other members of the NHS to keep informed of, and share with their peers, the latest developments in their fields.

"We buy quite a lot of knowledge materials from publishers, as well creating our own," he said. "And we want to make our service ubiquitous, making it as comprehensive as possible so we can get it into as many places as possible."

Eduserv, the not-for-profit IT services group provide its access and identity management service Athens, which is also used by many higher education (HE) institutions. McKinnell said this HE affiliation would be advantageous in establishing stronger links between the NLH portal and e-learning resources.

"We're looking to provide users with a personalised library, with access to relevant resources, which has to follow the person throughout their career as they move from hospital to hospital," he said. "We also need to build bridges to clinical systems, so we can get knowledge embedded in them."

The NLH portal uses Athens data to identify users' organisational affiliations, enabling searches across all of the resources that they are entitled to access. Athens also allows the portal to save the searches and settings of individual users, so every time a user logs on to the portal with their Athens username and password, the portal customises itself according to their preferences.

McKinnell said that working on the Athens platform enables the library to exploit open standards based on the XML standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains, known as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).

"SAML can facilitate greater collaboration and community-like communication s through the portal, where we've been talking to the JANET [government-funded computer network dedicated to education and research] team about approaches to linking education and research," he added.

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