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Wireless Technology Infrastructures for Authentication of Patients: PKI that Rings

Affiliations of the authors: Children's Hospital Informatics Program (US, IK, KDM) and Division of Emergency Medicine, Children's Hospital Boston, (IK, KDM); Harvard Medical School, (US, IK, KDM) Boston, MA.

Correspondence and reprints: Ulrich Sax, PhD, Children's Hospital Informatics Program, 1 Autumn Street AU543, Boston, MA 02115; e-mail: <usax{at}med.uni-goettingen.de>.

Received for publication: 08/20/04; accepted for publication: 12/20/04.

As the public interest in consumer-driven electronic health care applications rises, so do concerns about the privacy and security of these applications. Achieving a balance between providing the necessary security while promoting user acceptance is a major obstacle in large-scale deployment of applications such as personal health records (PHRs). Robust and reliable forms of authentication are needed for PHRs, as the record will often contain sensitive and protected health information, including the patient's own annotations. Since the health care industry per se is unlikely to succeed at single-handedly developing and deploying a large scale, national authentication infrastructure, it makes sense to leverage existing hardware, software, and networks. This report proposes a new model for authentication of users to health care information applications, leveraging wireless mobile devices. Cell phones are widely distributed, have high user acceptance, and offer advanced security protocols.

The authors propose harnessing this technology for the strong authentication of individuals by creating a registration authority and an authentication service, and examine the problems and promise of such a system.

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