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http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164904005
Extract: Despite the smart-card momentum the council will attempt to build in the health-care sector, not everyone will be an easy sell. John Halamka, CIO at Harvard Medical School and CareGroup Health System, which operates several Boston-area hospitals, says a big drawback to smart cards is the retrofitting that's needed by PCs to read the cards. "I have 16,000 PCs and none has a smart-card reader," he says. That means each of those PCs would need to be adapted, Halamka says in an E-mail interview. CareGroup is taking a different approach in its strategy for electronically accessing and sharing patient information. "We believe that having records available via secure clinical data exchange gateways on the Web is the right approach," Halamka says. "Gateways, which interconnect existing hospital information systems, ensure that data is protected, audited, and always available."
The motives for an FPKI "architecture day" seem stronger than ever. Note though that I don't consider smart cards and gateways as opposing technologies, but rather solutions that address different parts of a functional IT-infrastructure. That is, smart cards (and similar two-factor authentication schemes) are suitable for securing individual access to internal resources, while gateways are considerably more suitable for securing information flows between organizations. e-authentication is a gateway approach to individual access to external web-based resources.
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