Digsig in Germany for RX?

["Alan (Miburi-san) Wexelblat" <wex@media.mit.edu>]

[I snarfed this from Phil Agre's RRE list; I know nothing else about this...
--AW]

Date: Fri, 18 Feb 94 15:33:43 +0000
From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly)
Subject: MICE Seminar for February 22 at 14:00 GMT.
Newsgroups: dec.mail.lists.rem-conf

You are invited to the next MICE International Seminar which will
take place next week.

Please limit traffic for two hours from 14:00 GMT on Tuesday,
February 22.  This seminar will be transmitted on the usual multicast
addresses (please see the sd entry), and will be advertised in sd
from Tuesday morning. Further information of this and future seminars
is kept in the URL

        http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/seminars.html

Bruno Struif (GMD) speaking from Darmstadt, Germany will give a
presentation on:

"The Privacy Enhanced Electronic Prescription".

Abstract
--------

In Germany, more than 500 millions prescriptions are issued per
year. Normally, the patient receives the prescription in the doctor's
practice and takes it to a pharmacy where he gets his
medicaments. From the pharmacy, the prescription is physically
transported to a pharmacy computer center where it will be processed
in different ways. Finally the patient health insurance gets this
prescription with listings containing the result of the processing in
the pharmacy computer center.  Since the prescription is a paper
document, the processing is difficult, time-consuming and
cost-intensive.

The introduction of the health insurance card in Germany will improve
the technological environment in the doctor's practices.The
prescriptions will be produced in the future by using the health
insurance card, a personal computer and a printer. The model
presented shows that the electronic presentation of the prescription
produced in the doctor's PC can be maintained so that the difficult
and expensive way of processing paper prescriptions in the pharmacy,
the pharmacy's computer center and finally by the health insurance
can be avoided.

The solution described and already implemented at GMD is


 -  to sign the electronic prescription by the doctor with its physician smartcard
  capable to compute digital signatures
 -  to write the electronic prescription in the patient's smartcard
 -  to prove the authorization of a pharmacist for the access to the patient's
  smartcard by using a pharmacist smartcard
 -  to electronically transmit the electronic prescription together with pharmacy
  information (name of the pharmacy, prescription cost etc) to the pharmacy
  computer center or the health insurance computing center where it can be
  automatically processed.

The patient gets therefore two representation forms of the
prescription, the electronic form and the paper form. The
paper form is still necessary in the relationship
doctor/patient/pharmacist, since


 -  the patient has a right to look on the issued prescription,
 -  in case of malfunction of the patient's smartcard in the pharmacy 
    the delivery of the medicaments has still to be possible and 
 -  the assembly of the medicaments is easier with a paper form in the hand.


In the new release of the electronic prescription model a step in the
direction of data privacy has been made. The personal data of the
patient and the doctor are replaced by digital pseudonyms in a way
that the pharmacy computing center and the health insurance can
verify only certain characteristics, e.g. that the prescription has
been issued by a registered doctor and that the related patient is a
member of the respective health insurance. In special cases, a
re-identification of the doctor or the patient is possible by using
re-identification smartcards.


Gordon Joly         Phone +44 71 380 7934       FAX +44 71 387 1397
Email: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk    UUCP: ...!{uunet,uknet}!ucl-cs!G.Joly
Comp Sci, University College, London, Gower Street, LONDON WC1E 6BT
  WWW WWW WWW http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/gjoly.html WWW WWW WWW