A Proposed Solution for Managing Doctor's Smart Cards in Hospitals Using a Single Sign-On Central Architecture

This paper describes a single sign-on solution for the central management of health care provider's smart cards in hospitals. The proposed approach which is expected to be an improvement over current methods is made possible through the introduction of a national healthcare telematics infrastructure in Germany where every physician and every patient will automatically be given an electronic health smart card (for patients) and a corresponding health professional card (for health care providers). This introduction will cause changes in many existing health care administrative processes. The example process of writing a discharge letter is used in the paper to compare two existing approaches for integrating the new smart cards to the proposed single sign-on approach. Based on the findings we support a centralized single sign-on card management approach which allows us to exploit possible process improvements now and in the future. In closing we outline further application potentials of the described approach for management of smart cards in health care and, in particular, in hospitals.