Editor’s Note: The following article provides a word of warning about ambitious efforts to improve regulatory cybersecurity.
From: Pulse+IT (Australia)
Written by Kate McDonald
A digital identity and authentication expert has described the need for individual clinicians holding National Authentication System for Health (NASH) security tokens to renew them by fax as “bizarre”, saying it showed the six-year long NASH project was going backwards.
Stephen Wilson, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said a manual renewal system that still used a fax machine “rather takes the ‘e’ out of eHealth”.
Last week, Pulse+IT reported on the frustrations of former NEHTA clinical lead Mukesh Haikerwal when he received a notice that he had to renew his NASH PKI certificate for individual healthcare providers after just one year, and that he had to either fax or post his renewal application form to Medicare.
Mr Wilson said renewing by fax was bizarre, but that the deeper problem was the need for manual renewal. “Healthcare practitioners shouldn’t need to do any renewal, by fax or email or anything,” he said.
Mr Wilson said he had worked on a new form of certificate registration nearly a decade ago called relationship certificates, which are specific to different industry sectors and can be renewed with reference to definitive membership databases. In the case of healthcare, this would most obviously be the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA).
“The first relationship certificates were (ironically) piloted with Medicare nearly 10 years ago; the technique is approved by the Gatekeeper PKI Unit in the Department of Finance,” he said.
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