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Focus

Protecting Patient Privacy with Smart Cards

Strong authentication of healthcare employees is one method to significantly reduce the insider threat to medical identity theft. Issuing secure patient identity credentials is another equally important method that may not only reduce medical identity theft, but also bring numerous efficiencies to our antiquated health care system. An identity and authentication solution based on smart card technology provides the best foundation for improving healthcare information systems both from a security and privacy perspective. The federal government has already established a set of best practices, standards and technology solutions for smart card-based identity management and authentication that can be adapted to healthcare.

The Smart Card Alliance defines a smart card as "a device that includes an embedded integrated circuit chip (ICC) that can be either a secure microcontroller or equivalent intelligent device with internal memory or a memory chip alone. The card connects to a reader with direct physical contact or with a remote contactless radio frequency interface. With an embedded microcontroller, smart cards have the unique ability to store large amounts of data, carry out their own on-card functions (e.g., encryption and mutual authentication) and interact intelligently with a smart card reader. Smart card technology conforms to international standards (ISO/IEC 7816 and ISO/IEC 14443) and is available in a variety of form factors, including plastic cards, fobs, subscriber identification modules (SIMs) used in GSM mobile phones, and USB-based tokens."

"The microcontroller chip can add, delete, and otherwise manipulate information in its memory. A microcontroller is like a miniature computer, with an input/output port, operating system and hard disk. Smart cards with an embedded microcontroller have the unique ability to store large amounts of data, carry out their own on-card functions (e.g., encryption and digital signatures) and interact intelligently with a smart card reader." 7

Although smart cards have been in mass use around the globe since 1983, outside of the federal government, the United States has been slow to adopt these secure technology cards. France, Germany, Slovenia, Finland and Mexico are all examples of countries that have reduced fraud through the successful deployment of smart cards as electronic patient identity credentials.