Digital certificates offered to medical groups
Digital certificates offered to medical groups
System works on referral process
As providers prepare to embrace electronic communication standards mandated by the government, one company is moving ahead on providing an electronic identity for physicians and other licensed health care professionals.
MEDePass was founded in October 1999 as a for-profit affiliate of the California Medical Association in San Francisco. MEDePass’ digital certificate — an electronic identification card — allows physicians or other health care professionals to verify their on-line identities and conduct protected electronic communication through e-mail or over the Internet. A public key infrastructure provides the technical foundation for the digital certificate.
MEDePass was created because payers wanted the authentication of professional identities to come out of the professional associations, says Catherine Roth, chief operating officer for MEDePass. In addition to the California Medical Association, MEDePass officials are talking with other state medical associations about the digital certificates. The company says the Social Security Administration and Kaiser Permanente have agreed to recognize MEDePass certificates as on-line physician credentials.
The MEDePass system follows a process called the Colleague Referral Framework, in which health care providers and state and county associations identify and authenticate each individual’s professional status. MEDePass then corroborates that status with state licensing boards. "A MEDePass holder can refer a nonholder to the certificate authority and initiate the enrollment process by attesting to the identity of the other physician," Roth explains.
Once the physician’s identity has been guaranteed, MEDePass has insurance coverage that backs that guarantee. "Our certificate policy and our subscriber agreement and everything else reinforce the fact that [the health care professional] is not telling us a lie. We are checking the identity that has been triggered by this human being notification against the database," she adds.
MEDePass also makes ongoing checks to verify that the subscriber is a licensed provider.
Each MEDePass subscriber can control access to his or her directory information, depending on whether the entity seeking access is a patient or consumer, a MEDePass e-commerce business partner, a colleague, or entity such as a health plan.
MEDePass digital certificates also will enable licensed physicians and other health care professionals to access a range of secure services offered by MEDePass business partners, such as on-line clinical messaging, pharmacy applications, eligibility and authorization data exchange, and the ability to purchase restricted medical products and supplies.
Cost and time savings
Once digital certificates are in place, physicians can do tasks electronically that they previously had to do physically. "If you have a digital signature ability, you no longer have to haul people in to attach a signature to a document," Roth says.
For example, medical transcriptionists could e-mail transcription progress notes or medical records using their own digital signature to a physician, who could then digitally sign them. The record could be forwarded to another physician if needed without photocopying the record first.
In addition, if hospitals want to have remote communications with physicians over the Internet or any electronic network, they need to make sure they have no possibility of being deceived, according to the mandates of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, she adds.
"It is easy for anyone to create an e-mail and make it look like it came from [someone in authority]. Hospitals have to be certain that if they get an e-mail from a physician in another city asking for access to medical records for a patient in his or her facility, the physician shows a certificate that is guaranteed to represent a real doctor," Roth says.
Digital signatures and certification have a component of the revelation that resulted from having centralized data, Roth says, but it will take some time for the health care industry to recognize all the possibilities with digital certificates. "Until everyone is secure and confident about identities over the Internet or electronic transactions, it’s going to be hard to push doctors in facilities into this new world."
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