Improving computer security by health smart card.

Abstract

The University hospitals of Strasbourg have worked for several years on the computer security of the medical data and have of this fact be the first to use the Health Care Professional Smart Card (CPS). This new tool must provide security to the information processing systems and especially to the medical data exchanges between the partners who collaborate to the care of the Beyond the purely data-processing aspects of the functions of safety offered by the CPS, safety depends above all on the practices on the users, their knowledge concerning the legislation, the risks and the stakes, of their adhesion to the procedures and protections installations. The aim of this study is to evaluate this level of knowledge, the practices and the feelings of the users concerning the computer security of the medical data, to check the relevance of the step taken, and if required, to try to improve it. The survey by questionnaires involved 648 users. The practices of users in terms of data security are clearly improved by the implementation of the security server and the use of the CPS system, but security breaches due to bad practices are not however completely eliminated. That confirms that is illusory to believe that data security is first and foremost a technical issue. Technical measures are of course indispensable, but the greatest efforts are required after their implementation and consist in making the key players [2], i.e. users, aware and responsible. However, it must be stressed that the user-friendliness of the security interface has a major effect on the results observed. For instance, it is highly probable that the bad practices continued or introduced upon the implementation of the security server and CPS scheme are due to the complicated nature or functional defects of the proposed solution, which must therefore be improved. Besides, this is only the pilot phase and card holders can be expected to become more responsible as time goes by, along with the gradual national implementation of the CPS project and the introduction of new functions using electronic signatures and encryption.