Healthcare Smart Cards: the Growing Trend in Healthcare

Indian Healthcare Smart Cards

The usage of Smart Card is a new and growing trend in Healthcare which increases the effectiveness of our healthcare delivery system.

Smart Card is a tool for the patient created by healthcare providers. It contains computer-readable data that is issued to a person or healthcare provider to facilitate providing healthcare. Four subsets of data are necessary to operate the card: privacy protection, data unique to the consumer, administrative data and clinical data.  It conforms to the privacy and security provisions of HIPPA; in order to access, the user must provide a password, a PIN number or both (Thede & Sewell, chap. 14). Smart Card is currently in use in New York State by Queens Health Network and Mt Sinai Medical Center (Smart Card Alliance, 2011) .

Examples of Healthcare Smart Card in USA,
they look just like credit cards

The implementation of Smart Card will provide easier and more accurate access of patient information, expedite patient registration and admissions, decrease administration cost, reduce healthcare fraud and provide emergency medical information (Thede & Sewell, 2010, chap. 14) . If used appropriately, it can also decrease medical errors by providing all the necessary medical information to the healthcare provider, thus they can spot out medication contraindication right away.

Hopefully, Smart Card will be widely implemented in all healthcare setting in the near future, that can make our lives easier.

References

Thede, L. & Sewell, J. (2010) Informatics and Nursing: Competencies and Applications. Lippincott: Williams and Wilkins

Smart Card Alliance (2011) About Smart Card : Applications: Healthcare retrieved February 7th, 2011 from http://www.smartcardalliance.org/pages/smart-cards-applications-healthcare

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