A coalition of smart card industry executives is calling on the government to establish standards for identity management to help prevent the thousands of deaths that occur each year when healthcare providers misidentify a patient.
The Smart Card Alliance Healthcare and Identity Councils are asking Congress to include such standards in legislation that favors the adoption of electronic medical records – a pivotal part of President Barack Obama’s push for national healthcare reform.
“As we move away from paper-based medical records that are controlled by physical access to buildings, rooms and files, we need to have a healthcare infrastructure that supports strong identity and security controls,” said Paul Contino, chairman of the Smart Card Alliance Healthcare Council and vice president of information technology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. “The issues with establishing identity are compounded as electronic medical records are used by many different organizations at the regional, state and national levels. There must be a way to uniquely and securely authenticate each person across the healthcare infrastructure, whether that interaction is in person or over the Internet.”
According to Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the smart card alliance, 60 percent of the estimated 195,000 deaths that occur each year in the United States due to medical errors are attributed directly to a failure to correctly identify a patient.
“The lack of consistent and uniform identity management is at the root of the challenges faced by the healthcare industry today – lowering administrative costs, preventing medical identity theft and fraud, protecting patient privacy and enabling healthcare data exchanges,” he said. “Creating a healthcare identity management infrastructure based on smart card technology directly addresses these problems because it enables the ability to properly identify patients and healthcare providers, match healthcare records and identify individuals and healthcare providers that have authorized access to them.”
Alliance officials say identity management standards should be established before the government begins to invest its $19 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) stimulus funding in healthcare IT initiatives. Emphasizing electronic health record exchanges without establishing proper security measures, they argue, is akin to “putting the cart before the horse.”
Alliance officials are asking the government to follow the lead of existing federal standards such as the NIST Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 201 and the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card, both now being used by government agencies.
“NIST standards and the Federal Identity, Credential and Access Management (F/ICAM) committee vision and framework on identity management provide the foundation for the healthcare industry to jump-start the definition of a national healthcare identity management infrastructure and provide a proven model for interoperability across multiple organizations,” said Vanderhoof.
The Smart Card Alliance, based in Princeton Junction, N.J., is a not-for-profit, multi-industry association advocating the adoption and use of smart card technology. The alliance’s healthcare council is a group of healthcare payers, providers and technology executives, and its identity council is focused on promoting technology “to address the challenges of securing identity information and reducing identity fraud and to help organizations realize the benefits that secure identity information delivers.”
