Earlier this month, the SecureKey team attended the RSA Conference and HIMSS Conference, respectively—events we look forward to every year. These conferences are the meeting places for the sharpest, most innovative minds in the security and healthcare industries, attracting speakers for timely topics and great audiences.
As we walked the show floors at the respective events, there was a similar theme—identity.
Identity is at the center of SecureKey’s business and we take a lot of pride in working with companies to ensure the security of consumer identities remain intact. So it comes as no surprise that we were excited to see identity take center stage at these events.
RSA Conference 2016
In the panel session, “Deconstructing Identity in Security,” Kim Cameron of Microsoft remarked on Windows CardSpace (aka InfoCard), the now cancelled client software that was intended to serve as a person’s digital identity they could use to communicate with a third-party service provider (relying party in federation terms). CardSpace was pulled from the market in part because it didn’t address the problem of the service provider customer needs in addition to its primary focus of being user-centric with user-controlled release of identity attributes.
While a user-centric model is great, it’s equally critical to solve the relying party’s primary goal of increasing account opening conversions (lower abandonment) with ease of use and simple implementation.
HIMSS 2016
Traditionally at HIMSS Conferences, identity isn’t as mainstream as it is at the RSA Conference, but it plays a critical role in protecting patient information. At this year’s event, patient ID and mobile health were prominent topics, which makes sense because matching the correct patient ID to the correct health record is an ongoing challenge for many healthcare organizations.
LifeMed ID, a SecureKey partner, showed attendees how health providers can identify patients using multiple authentication methods such as a mobile phone, smart card, etc. This is important for healthcare organizations that need to ensure the access it provides for partners and patients is secure.
It’s an exciting time for identity in healthcare, spurred by the growing need to protect patient privacy and maintain regulatory compliance. For these reasons, identity will play a more prominent role in the space, especially as accessing medical information online becomes more mainstream.
Did You Know?
As we talk about identity in the security and healthcare spaces, we’d be remiss not to remind you about SecureKey’s “Did You Know” campaign which is helping citizens understand how they can more easily access e-gov services and ensure their data is protected. Working closely with the Government of Canada and some of Canada’s largest financial institutions, we are helping Canadians make sense of tax time. To learn more about how to make filing taxes as easy and accessible as possible, visit: https://securekeyconcierge.com/did-you-know