HIC, which is the government agency responsible for Medicare and the pharmaceutical benefits scheme (PBS) announced yesterday that it has appointed Baltimore Technologies subsidiary, Certificates Australia (CAPL) as its first outsourced provider of digital certificates using PKI technology.
According to Andrew Parkes, HIC's general manager for E-business the arrangement will speed up the progress to providing a range of secure online services over the Internet, not just the Medicare claims and payments, which run to several billion dollars.
Parkes stressed that the secure exchange of information was designed in part to provide better health outcomes for patients, and the confidential nature of the information was a primary consideration.
Parkes said that over the next six to nine months, the PKI technology over the Internet would be used on a number of HIC services. It will commence with patient claims via doctors' surgeries, doctors' claims, the immunisation data and then the simplified billing agency system, which combines the various bills from a hospital visit.
According to John Palfreyman, Baltimore Technologies' managing director for Asia Pacific, "The scope of the HIC's requirements for its secure Internet business were particularly challenging. I am proud to say that only Baltimore could provide HIC with all the options to achieve their objectives, making it easier for them to get started now, knowing that they have flexibility to adapt their systems as on-line healthcare evolves into the future."
The HIC's E-business division came into being in the middle of last year with the aim of improving information flow and is in line with the government's online agenda. "We need to provide online as a serious option," Parkes noted. He explained that Medicare records around 200 million transactions per year, while the PBS generates 150 million. "We could reasonably expect 40 per cent to be conducted over the Internet within the next 18 months," he added.
CAPL is the first company to receive entry level accreditation under the Commonwealth's Project Gatekeeper to provide PKI products developed in accordance with Government requirements. As a result, Baltimore already has in place a number of contracts with Commonwealth Government departments and agencies.
The HIC service will employ a combination of digital signatures to 'sign' electronic documents. There will be strong encryption - built into both the desktop applications and browsers - to ensure total privacy of information and tamper-proof communications.
Parkes added that the digital certificates would start to be issued over the next month and would be supplied to doctors and health providers at no cost.
