Guest Post By Scott Lindley: Creating A Health Care Provider Access System

Scott Lindley, a 26-year veteran of the contactless card access control industry authored a guest article in our latest issue of Total Access magazine. Here’s what Scott had to say about creating a health care provider access system.

Creating a Health Care Provider Access System

-By Scott Lindley-

Let’s look at a typical health care center and its electronic access control system. It will have several main campuses and a score of remote satellite care centers. It may have a legacy magnetic stripe card based access system. By the time the integrator arrives, it will be in desperate need of an upgrade. How are successful integrators handling such a challenge? The first and biggest decision will be which kind of card to propose.

Since the transition will happen over time, you might want to consider combination proximity/magnetic stripe cards. Greatly simplifying the administration of the change-over, this would allow employees to use their new card on the legacy magnetic stripe readers and, once the new proximity readers were installed, they could keep using the same card.

However, if you upgrade to a smart card with magnetic stripe, you achieve the same installation results, but propel your customer into creating a cashless medical campus, eliminating internal security threats while facilitating higher levels of security. Among the functions of the new system would be secure reads of access data with the ability to utilize the remaining storage for applications other than door-based electronic access control.

SELLING THE BENEFITS IS KEY

Thoroughly clarify the built-in encryption features of the cards. Customers have heard that smart cards are more secure than proximity cards but don’t know why. A 13.56MHz contactless smart card based upon DESFire EV1 uses 128 bit AES encryption, the same as used by the U.S. federal government. DESFire EV1 is based on open global standards for both air interface and cryptographic methods. It is normally compliant to all 4 levels of ISO/IEC 14443A and can make use of optional ISO/IEC 7816-4 commands.

Thus, smart cards with MIFARE DESFire EV1 protection are ideal for sales to large health care service networks wanting to use secure multi-application smart cards in both access management and closed-loop e-payment applications. They fully comply with the requirements for fast and highly secure data transmission, flexible memory organization and interoperability with existing infrastructures.

Propose MAXSecure, explaining that it provides an anti-hacking, high-security handshake, or code, between the smart card and reader to help prevent duplication and ensure that customers’ readers will only collect data from the hospital’s specially coded smart card credentials. Consider Valid ID, which acts as a cipher immunization for each smart card, acting to passively tamperproof the credentials against cloning and the unauthroized manipulation of the access data stored within.

NOW, UPGRADE THE NEW SYSTEM AS YOU SELL IT

Suggest an identification and a payroll deduction scheme for purchases made in the cafeterias. To do this easily, propose a multi-factor combo contactless smart card reader and keypad unit at each point-of-sale station.

If you fully elucidate each feature’s benefit, you can end up with the type of access system VidCom Solutions in Lansing, Michigan, sold. Today their health care customer’s system controls some 1,750 access points, 50,000 users and 850 cameras, as well as effectively integrating badging, intrusion, and a payroll deduction application. In addition, there are some 50 remote sites that tie into the system with full smart card credential interaction between sites.

The good news! There is at least one prospect like this in almost every integrator’s area.