The Health Information Net (HIN) and Certifaction launch HIN Sign: The blockchain signature for the Swiss healthcare industry.
The handwritten signature is an outdated concept. It is inefficient, prone to forgery and difficult to verify. Every day, health practitioners spend too much time processing medical documents of all kinds and many resources are tied up in signing, scanning, filing or distributing these documents securely. When documents are digitally signed, process costs can be substantially reduced.
Although the digitization of processes brings a lot of benefits, it also creates new kinds of risks, starting with security and privacy concerns. Privacy is particularly relevant when the underlying data is highly sensitive, as it is the case for medical documents.
With the above in mind, HIN decided to launch HIN Sign, a service that combines the HIN eID with a white-label solution developed by Certifaction. HIN Sign enables doctors to reap the benefits of digital signatures without making any trade-offs on privacy and security.
Single-sign-on (SSO) with the HIN eID allows for proper authentication of the health practitioners. They can then digitally sign medical documents directly on their devices, making the signed documents both tamper-proof and easily verifiable. The signing process happens locally on the doctors’ devices and no documents are uploaded in clear to the cloud. This privacy-by-default provides the much needed reassurance, in terms of confidentiality, to healthcare providers.
HIN Sign is also highly innovative through its use of extremely secure blockchain-technology: The fingerprint (i.e. hash) of the document is recorded on the Ethereum blockchain and cannot be reverse-engineered. This means that there is no single point of failure (a central database for example), which can be hacked or tampered with by an insider.
Further information can be found on the website of HIN (in German).