Standards Leadership

Since its inception, Sentillion has been a leader in defining innovative IT standards for the healthcare industry. Sentillion’s SignOn Manager was the first commercially available fully compliant solution to incorporate the Health Level 7 (HL7) Context Management ("CCOW") standard, the only industry standard for single sign-on and context management. HL7 is an ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organization for clinical and administrative healthcare systems. It is a not-for-profit organization that includes healthcare providers, vendors, payors, consultants, government groups, and others committed to healthcare standards. Sentillion is a founding member of HL7 CCOW and continues to play a vital role promoting the value and benefits as well as leading initiatives to enhance and extend the standard.

CCOW enables multiple clinical applications to be synchronized and coordinated at the user's point-of-use around a specific context, such as a patient or user. For example, when a user selects a patient in one application, all of the applications opened by that user will automatically tune their data displays to the selected patient's data. The applications appear to the user as if they were part of the same product suite. 

The CCOW standard was pioneered in 1996 by an independent consortium of healthcare providers and vendors including the former Hewlett Packard Medical Products Group, the company from which Sentillion was launched. The CCOW consortium was co-chaired by Robert Seliger, Sentillion's co-founder and CEO. In 1998, Mr. Seliger led the way for merging CCOW into HL7. 

As part of his vision for CCOW, Mr. Seliger spearheaded an approach to creating a healthcare IT standard that included not only the specification of abstract interfacing principles and policies, but also included fully detailed application programming interfaces expressed for multiple popular technologies. CCOW’s highly-specific but technology-neutral approach to developing a standard provides more precision and mitigation of implementation ambiguities than any previous healthcare IT standard. This approach enabled application vendors to use technologies they were comfortable with and yet still achieve a tremendous amount of plug-and-play CCOW-level interoperability. Currently, Mr. Seliger continues to serve as the CCOW co-chair.
 
Today, all major HIS vendors, including virtually all clinical healthcare application providers, are shipping or planning to ship Windows and Web-based CCOW-compliant applications.  As one of the original developers of the CCOW standard, Sentillion has remained actively involved in leading its continual growth and enhancement.  We are committed to helping today’s healthcare institutions implement CCOW-based solutions using their existing multi-vendor applications and systems, which includes the distribution of our CCOW Software Development Kit, the first and only such SDK in the healthcare industry.  More than 200 vendors and provider institutions have added CCOW support to their applications through the use of Sentillion’s SDK. Further, Sentillion’s innovative “immersion” program has enabled application developers to work side-by-side with Sentillion’s engineers to add CCOW support to the standard.

Recent CCOW developments include the publication of a Best Practices and Common Mistakes document in 2006. In 2007 work continues on the development of a Common Criteria Security Protection Package for CCOW compliant applications and context managers, and to explore how CCOW, which has its own standard for Web-based single sign-on, can also accommodate applications that follow the more recent OACIS SAML standard for web-based single sign-on.