The Smart Card Alliance Health care Council will focus on educating the industry on the need for a solid, secure identity management infrastructure, its newly elected officers said.

“This has been an important year for the health care industry, with the federal government ready to invest over $19 billion in health care information technology as a result of the ARRA HITECH Act, and interest growing around the use of electronic medical records,” said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. “The Health care Council has made a lot of progress this year, raising awareness of the need for a strong identity management infrastructure that is a necessary foundation for using electronic medical records, and introducing smart cards as a secure technology for health care applications.”

The officers and steering committee that will lead the Council for the upcoming year are:

Chair: Paul Contino, Mount Sinai Medical Center·
Vice chair: Michael Magrath, CSCIP, Gemalto
Secretary: Dale Grogan, CSCIP, LifeMed / SMART Association
Ola Martins, Oberthur Technologies
Matthew Neuman, Giesecke & Devrient
This past year, the Health care Council partnered with the Secure ID Coalition on the health care IT briefing in Washington, DC, “Protecting Your Health Information: Raising Public Awareness of the Privacy and Security Challenges of Health care Information Management.”

The council continued educational efforts by collaborating with the Smart Card Alliance Identity Council on two papers addressing health care identity management, “Health care Identity Management: The Foundation for a Secure and Trusted National Health Information Network,” and “Effective Health care Identity Management: A Necessary First Step for Improving U.S. Health care Information Systems,” and hosting the webinar, “Identity Management in Health care.”

The Smart Card Alliance Health care Council is currently developing a position paper on data breaches and identity theft.

The Smart Card Alliance has been invited by the organizers of RSA Conference 2010 to deliver a special one-day tutorial for security professionals interested in overcoming identity management challenges presented by new and changing security regulations, compliance considerations, and data breach threats. This is the fifth consecutive year that the Smart Card Alliance has provided an educational workshop on the use of smart card technology for information security at the RSA Conference, the world’s leading information security conferences and expositions.
The Alliance’s three-part tutorial, “Smart Cards and Identity Management for Public and Private Enterprises” (TUT-M11), will be held Monday, March 1st from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M.
“Professionals in the enterprise security business are changing their approaches to security policy, identity management, and authentication. They are looking for strong solutions to securely establish identities, as well as to authenticate those identities for both physical and logical access,” said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. “To this end, we have drawn on the expertise of our membership to create this full day tutorial that details the role of smart cards for strong identity management.”
The tutorial will discuss the ways to establish an identity, transform identity attributes into digital credentials, and assign privileges associated with that identity. Presenters will also explain methods for presenting the credentials in a secure, authenticated manner for physical and logical access, and explore real-life use cases for large-scale identity systems.
Security and identity management expert presenters are: Stephen Howard, vice president of operations, CertiPath; Gerald Smith, senior consultant, ID Technology Partners; Iana Bohmer, director identity management, Northrop Grumman; Chris Williams, corporate IT security controls, SAIC; and Bryan Ichikawa, vice president of identity solutions, federal systems, Unisys. Also, Randy Vanderhoof, executive director, Smart Card Alliance, will be moderating the session and giving an update on government and commercial implementations of secure identification and information technology security market trends.

The Smart Card Alliance Contactlessand Mobile Payments Council yesterday introduced new tools for merchants accepting or thinking about accepting contactless and mobile payments. Merchants can now access a model to calculate return on investment (ROI) for accepting contactless payments, as well as an online discussion forum to interact with and ask industry experts questions and post comments about contactless and mobile payments.
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GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) HSPD-12 Managed Service Office was recently recognized by the Smart Card Alliance for its leading role in personalizing and issuing Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards for 67 federal agencies. 

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The Smart Card Alliance today announced the 2008 award winners for “Outstanding Smart Card Achievement” (OSCA) in the North American and Latin American smart card industry during its annual conference, taking place at the CTST 2008 The Americas Conference and Exhibition. 

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