INTEGRATION OF SMART CARDS INTO CANADA HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

Integration of Smart Cards into Canada Health Care System



Integration of Smart Cards into Canada Health Care System

Introduction

In today's world, the need for automation systems in hospitals and medical centers gain more importance each day. The purpose of the automation systems is to increase the accuracy and the speed of knowledge circulation which will lead to better service for patients and increasing response (work) efficeny of hospital personnel. The ultimate idea for hospital automation systems is to accomplish a network in/among hospitals that obtains, stores, analyzes/processes and uses patient information. The storage and the sharing of the obtained/analyzed/processed information is in the scope of information technologies and expert systems. All these systems will help to evaluate a patient from previously stored information in case of his consultation to a hospital/health center again. It's important to be able to retrieve a patient's previous information and act accordingly in addition to the new symptoms of a suspected illness(Gordons, 1998).

These problems can be solved by increasing the capabilities of hospital automation systems with intelligent storage, retrieval and inferencing mechanisms. In addition, the experience and improving patient service quality of some countries show us that using a portable media for each patient to store patient specific information is an essential part of a hospital automation system. The patient can carry the media with him/her anywhere and any time. It is presented to the doctor at the time of consultation and stores on it various health aspects such as administrative profile, medical folder (containing in particular the emergency medical data) and follow up of blood transfusions, vaccinations, etc.

Storing medical information in an electronic format raises concerns about patient privacy and confidentiality. It is recognized that a security breach of electronic medical records might involve hundreds of thousands of records and go unnoticed. However as mentioned previously, microprocessor chip smart cards offer excellent security features as this type of technology has been used in banking for many years and has never been breached. In addition, the patient record is partitioned, so that the individual name and address is in one area, and the medication he or she takes is in another. That would make it hard for anyone who breaks into a Web server to connect medication data with a patient identity(Peyret, 1994).

Discussion

The media selected for the above purposes should be cheap, easy to use, carry and update with new information and shouldn't get damaged easily. The media we propose is “smart cards” whose successful applications can also be found in our country in transportation systems and telecommunication systems. We'll refer to such cards as “health cards”.

Since some medical data will be carried on a health card, in case of an emergency, a doctor or paramedic if equipped with a smart card reader could quickly learn a patient's blood type, allergies, medications and medical conditions if he/she suffers from high blood loss as a result of a car accident. If needed, additional data could be available to ...