A multilayered architecture for the development of smart card-based healthcare applications

The use of smart cards in healthcare promises to improve both the quality and the availability of healthcare services, providing a convenient and secure medium for storing and communicating medical information. However, the adoption of healthcard implementations within the national healthcare systems and IT strategies is relatively slow, blocked by a number of technical, administrative and medical barriers. This paper addresses the above problem by presenting a reference architecture, which facilitates healthcard applications development, covering all healthcare specific requirements and needs. The proposed architecture enables the development of cost-effective, flexible and interoperable healthcard solutions in Java, that make use of ISO 7816-compliant smart cards on different target platforms such as Windows, network computers and handheld devices.