On Thu, 24 Oct 1996 07:43:41 +0100, you wrote:
>> The way things are moving in the Internet world, the technical
>> solutions required to meet the BMAs concerns will, I suspect, be
>> unlikely to need a dedicated "secure" network.
>
>Once you can make a clinical message safe by signing it, and
>private by encrypting it, then obviously the security of the
>transport medium becomes simply a matter of availability. You
>could use the Internet - or even the NHSnet. You would have to
>worry about whether the Internet would get clogged, as Bob
>Metcalfe predicts will happen this year, and whether the NHSnet
>would suffer from similar problems - such as with an overloaded
>firewall
Sure, I agree, and this is clearly a big unknown, with pundits on both
the "it will collapse under demand" and the "bandwidth will keep being
added" sides. I rather hope the latter will be the case, but I'll
simply watch with interest :-)
I think the more interesting point you make, though, is on the signing
of clinical messages: Whilst I fully understand the need for this in
the mesaging/EDI paradigm, it is much less clear to me whether such
signatures are a necessity/relevant in the Web/interactive paradigm
(ref my earlier threads) where, say, the path results are not
physically copied via EDI from hospital system to GP system but are
accessed interactively each time they are needed - ie the GP is just
using another "dumb terminal" connected to the hospital system with
specific, limited priveleges to access certain data (as deemed by the
appropriate rules/guidelines/responsibilities)
So, simple question, but I suspect it requires a complex answer :-((
is the need for digital signatures a necessity brought on by virtue
of the messaging/EDI paradigm per se?
With the corollary:
if you do things in a non-messaging way (eg Web/Interactive), is a
digital signature superfluous/not a relevant thing, provided the
application has the appropriate access controls etc?
---
Rob Tweed
IM&T Consulting Ltd; Health Web Services Ltd;
M/Gateway Developments Ltd
http://www.hwsl.co.uk/mgw
Tel: (+44) 181 540 1325
Fax: (+44) 181 715 4337
---
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|