The Smart Card Alliance has released a white paper, “A Health care CFO’s Guide to Smart Card Technology and Applications,” detailing how the technology can help the market.
Health care is an industry that has been relying more on IT to lower costs and create administrative efficiencies, improve patient outcomes and enhance physician and patient relations and meet increasing privacy, security and identity concerns, as a result of federal and state directives mandating increased control over private information.
“For health care CFOs, the challenge is not only to secure the funding for new technology, but also to weigh the potential benefits of new and emerging technology against the costs,” the paper states. “Serious consideration must be given to the consequences of technology adoption for legacy systems, life- cycle costs, and long-term technology evolution.”
Countries in Europe and Asia have been using smart cards in health care for years, but in the U.S. there are only a handful of projects. The paper states that there are four areas where smart cards can help in health care in the U.S.:
- Identification and patient authentication
- Matching patients to their particular data
- Synchronizing data from disparate sources
- Security and access control
The full white paper can be downloaded here ![[end]](/resources/bullet/secureidnews-4.gif)
