Hospitals have heard for years to deploy ID infrastructure; here’s a new nudge

A day’s not complete in the digital ID world until someone (and usually it’s many people) shakes a stick accusingly at health care (and usually it’s in the United States).

Here are three announcements addressing the need for broadly deployed, secure and efficient systems.

The first one is expected to address industry accreditations.

Inteleos, a nonprofit health care certification organization, says it’s going to collaborate with identity verification exchange Credivera to create digital identities and verifiable credentials. The goal is to address fraud but also to make credential verification more efficient with a digital wallet.

If successful, the collaboration could offer verification services on a broader scale than per facility or hospital company. However, it would focus on Inteleos’ commercial work with continuing education organizations.

The wallet will be able to hold multiple other digital credentials, according to Inteleos.

Meanwhile, a team of digital health researchers in Canada launched a rapid review of data about federated digital identifiers have been established and launched in the field.

The researchers were from either Women’s College Hospital or the University of Toronto. They said they found important features, including opt-out registration, that were linked to better adoption rates of patient accessible electronic health records.

In database and Google searchers, the team found 93 references to federated digital IDs in health care, which could be said to be miniscule. Among the nations using federated IDs were Australia, Canada, Estonia, Singapore, Sweden and Taiwan.

Ten of the 11 nations use a single sign-on. Most programs are national or provincial in scale and require people to go to a bank or government office to enroll. The average adoption rate is below 30 percent.

Australians are allowed to verify their ID and register entirely online, and adoption was about 90 percent. Australia also uses a an opt-out consent model.

Neither the United States nor almost all other European Union members showed up in the search.

An infrastructure approach to ID verification popped up in a LinkedIn post from Christine Kim, an investor with Greylock Partners venture fund.

Kim describes how in the United Kingdom people use a National Health Service login that is authenticated once by uploading the image of government ID and a selfie. Providers get access to the information they need to treat the patient for the visit.

The infrastructure approach eases verification and has a better chance off improving outcomes because data access is efficient and consistent.

Article Topics

Credivera  |  digital ID  |  digital ID infrastructure  |  patient identification  |  verifiable credentials