Quality labels for e-health

Abstract

A drug e-prescription demonstrator was created in compliance with existing legislation as well as security and privacy standards. A professional ID-card was built on a high security chip (ISTEC E4 High; EAL-5) with a Hash hardware accelerator for a digital signature placed in a single chip USB token. Commercial software products as well as development kits of the new hardware designed in the project were used to build an authentication, authorisation and electronic signature demonstrator. The degree of legal compliance was evaluated. The tested novel single chip USB token was highly efficient but limited by its 1.1 interface speed (12 Mbit/s). The chip, initialised with a banking-mask, inefficiently managed space for the health-care chain of trust. The public key and privilege management infrastructure was not able to handle health-care attributes in the appropriate extensions. Templates for role-rule privileges were not available and healthcare standards for security and privacy were not found in commercial products. The paper points out the urgent need for an e-health conformance label as well as a quality label for liability and confidence to gain users' trust.