Health Information Management

Workgroup weighs user authentication standards

HIPAA Weekly Advisor, October 30, 2006

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The Confidentiality, Privacy, and Security Workgroup is considering whether to recommend a standard that would require physicians to identify patients before allowing the patients to access secure messaging and records systems, Healthcare IT News reports.

The group, a component of HHS' American Health Information Community, wants to make user-authentication recommendations by December. At its last meeting on September 29, the workgroup weighed in-person versus online authentication techniques, according to a minutes summary.

Although in-person authentication is a strong standard, the group acknowledges that it is resource-intensive, not easy to scale, and could be susceptible to social engineering. Online identity verification would eliminate these problems but raise questions about security and accuracy.

Click here to read the Healthcare IT News article.



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