An interopiO Environment acts as a grouping of components.  Each interopiO component (Data Adapters, Apps, Gateways, etc.) live inside an environment and may interact with components from that same environment, but not with components outside that environment. For example, a data adapter may be configured for use in any gateway created in the same environment, but cannot be used by a gateway outside of it.

Users may decide to create environments for various reasons:

• Separation of PHI components from non-PHI components
• Distinguish between development, testing, staging, production components
• Create temporary or permanent sandbox environments for training and prototyping

Indicating If an Environment Contains PHI

When creating an environment you will be asked to indicate if it will contain PHI or not. This is used to enforce various security practices and ensure the requirements of the HIPAA Security Rule are met.  Enforcing these security practices can be expensive and can also be inconvenient when testing, so we allow the creation of non PHI environments for convenience.

Once the environment is created, this setting cannot be changed.

Environment Permissions

Environment permissions are managed at the account level by an account owner.  Account owners can view all environments, while users can be assigned the permission 'None', 'Read' or 'Admin' on each environment.

• None - The user cannot see or interact with this environment
• Read - The user can view all settings on this environment, but cannot change them
• Admin - The user can read and write all settings on this environment

Environment ID

The environment ID must meet the following requirements:

• must be at least one character in length

• must start with a letter and end with a letter or a number

• can only contain: lower case letters of the English alphabet, numbers (0-9), hyphen/minus sign (-)

• may not be any of the following: "app", "apps", "auth", "cdn", "cdr", "cdrs", "cds", "dstu2", "env", "etl", "fhir", "msg", "r4", "status", "stu3", "zipkin"