“Federations support business-to-business security allowing new combinations of constituent-focused Web solutions,” Coderre said.

“As a result, we believe we have made tremendous progress in Aetna’s ability to simplify business transactions and to deliver quality service and tools to providers doing business with us as well as payers,” he said.

As of Aug. 31, 2008, more than 480,000 provider offices, including 378,000 participating Aetna providers, are registered to use Aetna’s secure provider Web site via NaviNet, with more than 4.5 million electronic transactions transmitted since February.

NaviMedix supports multi-party federation for Aetna and its trading partners.

“NaviMedix sees a continued interest from our health plan customers and partners in leveraging transactional and communications capabilities across multiple platforms and to multiple constituents,” said Kendra Obrist, vice president of product management.

“The ability to support complex security and privacy policies is the key to successfully accomplishing this,” she said.

“As various healthcare constituents, including health plans, care management companies and provider organizations, look to share and exchange more clinical information, the ability to federate multi-party security schemes is critical,” she said.