Publishing

While Guardian is an excellent tool for managing privilege assignment, its real purpose it to make privilege information available to your medical staff, schedulers, and administrators. The way Guardian accomplishes this is through a mechanism called Publication.

Many "web enabled" applications on the market utilize an "Active Content" model which requires the installation of web servers, database servers, and application frameworks to make information available in your intranet. They generally consist of an application that runs on a web server and "listens" for page requests, then when your web browser requests a page, they build the page requested. These are typically very expensive items and expose your network to many vulnerabilities from hackers and viruses. For this reason many organizations have strict rules on what web server or database servers can be used.

To avoid these expenses and security concerns, instead of an Active Content model, Guardian uses a publication model. This has many advantages including security, speed, maintenance, and cost.

This model was chosen because Guardian is designed from the ground up to be a high availability application. Once privilege information is published, it requires no additional software on a server to send those pages to a browser when it is requested. As long as your network is up, Guardian publications are available.

The good news is that the way the information is sent to web browsers is seamless to the Guardian user. While you are making changes in providers, privileges, and assignments, Guardian is quietly publishing those changes in the background automatically. That means that the most current information is always available, day or night, even on weekends and holidays.

When Guardian is first installed and no data new providers or privileges have been entered, there is no published data available for web browsers in your network. The first step to enabling web browser availability is to publish the base level information by performing a Rebuild.

Depending on the number of privileges and providers in Guardian, a Rebuild can take from three minutes to half an hour to complete. You may still work in Guardian while a Rebuild is running.

Once the Rebuild has been completed, any changes made (such as providers or privileges added or privilege assignments) will automatically be published as you work.

Once a Rebuild has been done, a Refresh is a way to immediately publish any changes without waiting for Guardian to publish it automatically.A refresh only publishes what has changed since the last refresh was run. If you, for example, have flagged a provider as "Inactive" and want to insure the the change is immediately available throughout the network, running a Refresh will insure that the change is immediately published.

A Refresh is only publishing changes (not all information in Guardian), so it completes much more quickly, typically in under two minutes. You may still work in Guardian while a Refresh is running.

Since the Search By Privilege lists are only published during a Rebuild, it is recommended that a Rebuild is run at least once a week if any changes have been made to privilege assignments or privilege names or wording.