Smart Cards

Smart Cards

Introduction

Maintaining records and documentation are two of the most important aspects of healthcare and perioperative practice, without any exception for either one of these. In today's world, there are a number of methods of maintaining medical records which range from folders to electronic databases. It is not surprising to computers being used to maintain patient record in a place where all other equipment is computerized. A study conducted in June 2008 by Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, a non-profit organization, revealed that more than 50 percent of the hospitals employ some form electronic documentation of patient information in a database. The study also reveals that 20 percent of hospitals use a very basic IT infrastructure and none of the facilities is completely automated (Fong & Zhuang, 2012).

The large percentage of hospitals and healthcare service providers still employ the traditional method of paper-based record keeping. This conventional system of maintain patient records is has been the method of choice for decades and some professional still favor this method. This system had the intention of maintaining privacy of information at heart, but also has the drawback of being portable. Paper records can be copied, faxed or transferred to another location (Naeme, 1997). However, since this method is feasible and often preferred by practitioners, it remains present even in today's modern era. The risks, however, of theft, duplication and alteration remain. The system also has the drawback of being inefficient. With the records being stored in various formats and patients visiting different service providers, fragmentation of records makes it cumbersome to transfer information (Starr, 1997). This division of patient records leads to an increase in risk of medical errors, duplication of procedures and wastage of time. For example, the report by Health Affairs in 2005 stated that an electronic method of record keeping can result in savings of $142 to $371 billion. By continuing with the existing method of record keeping, Medicare would continue to lose payments, predicting a decline of 1% by the year 2015. This method also put undue burden on the entire healthcare industry (McIver, 2002).

Smart Cards in Healthcare

For this purpose, the idea of having smart cards for patients was proposed. A smart card is known as a card that incorporates one or more electronic circuits integrated in its thickness. The concept is similar to that of a flash drive (USB) or USB pen that contains a piece of memory enclosed in a plastic case. These proposed smart cards would have the potential to store information due to microcontrollers that encode and decode all information. These cards would provide security by being tamper proof and the reader would be able to view information in a secure manner. These cards have two generic types which are contact cards and contactless cards. Contact cards have the ability to be read by a person through an interface while contactless cards can be read through radio frequency identification (RIFD).

Given the advancement in storage devices, it would be feasible to ...