Executive Director’s Letter

Dear members and friends of the Alliance,

On several occasions in past newsletters, I have raised the issue about the need and timing for the U.S. payments industry to move to chip and PIN technology. I’ve discussed my feelings on the subject from the perspective of rising fraud rates in the U.S. and the costs of such a move to industry stakeholders. I have even made the point that perhaps there is another way to improve payment security without adopting full EMV contact chip technology, which requires end-to-end reworking of the bank cards, the merchant acceptance terminals, and the back-end processing systems. Today, I have nothing fundamentally different to propose, except to raise the basic question of timing for this eventual shift from today’s legacy magnetic stripe infrastructure to the next great thing, whatever it is. If not now – then when?

Member Profile: HID Global – Interview with Nathan Cummings

This month, Smart Card Talk spoke with Nathan Cummings, Director Integration/Applications, with HID Global. In this position, Nathan oversees the technical integration of HID Global products within the strategic partner community, as well as defines synergies among existing products to provide new solutions.

Since joining the company in 2000 as a product engineer managing beta testing and performing competitive analysis, Nathan has continued to rise through the ranks of HID Global, including holding the positions of product marketing manager and manager of partner integration. Nathan was pivotal in the design, release and support of the iCLASS® contactless smart card product line. He also previously served as director of reader technologies in the company’s design and research facility located in Denver, Colorado, where he played an integral part in gaining GSA FIPS-201 approval for the iCLASS reader line.

Feature of the Month

Effective Healthcare Identity Management: A Necessary First Step for Improving U.S. Healthcare Information Systems

Government policy makers are looking carefully at the best ways to improve the efficiency of information systems in the healthcare industry. Much emphasis has been placed on the need for electronic health records for every American, and at ways to exchange those records at the regional, state and national levels.

But this is putting the cart before the horse. Such an effort must start with the accurate identification of each person receiving healthcare services or participating in healthcare benefit programs. Next, there must be a way to uniquely and securely authenticate that person across the healthcare system, including over the Internet, in a secure and privacy sensitive way.

This brief introduces the current problems with healthcare identity management, security and privacy, and proposes leveraging existing federal standards and technologies already used in other government identity programs. The Healthcare and Identity Councils of the Smart Card Alliance, a non-profit public/private partnership organization whose members include healthcare providers, government users and technology providers, prepared the brief.