With EMV payment terminals rolling out across the U.S. and heath care fraud totaling billions of dollars the Smart Card Alliance suggests that these new payment devices could help stymie health care fraud.

The alliance released a white paper detailing how converging EMV payments and health care identity could reduce costs and complexity for providers while reducing fraud.

The paper gives four scenarios on how the new system might work:

Scenario 1: Two chip cards and one multi-application point-of-sale terminal

The two chip cards perform independent transactions on the same payments terminal, which runs two separate applications to route transaction information to the appropriate back-end system

Scenario 2: One multi-application chip card and one multi-application terminal

A single chip card hosts two applications that use the same payments terminal. One chip card application manages financial payment transactions while the second application manages health care identity authentication. The POS terminal runs two separate applications to route transaction information to the appropriate back-end system.

Scenario 3: One chip card with a “special” payment application

In a variation of Scenario 2, a special payment application on the chip card provides non-payment transactional support.

Scenario 4: Mobile health care transactions

Mobile transactions can use NFC with a terminal that supports contactless payments. The mobile application could use a derived credential from any of the above scenarios to facilitate a mobile transaction for health care identity authentication or payment.

The pace of EMV migration in the U.S. is accelerating. According to the EMV Migration Forum, more than 400 million EMV chip cards have been issued in the U.S. as of the end of 2015, with over 60% of consumers having at least one EMV chip card in their wallets.

Most major retailers have converted legacy payment systems to systems that include smart card readers that can accept EMV-compliant chip cards and many have also included support for NFC and contactless payments as part of the conversion. U.S. retailers are making progress in migrating their legacy infrastructure to support EMV chip payments, with more than 750,000 merchant locations enabled as of January 2016.

By adopting the smart card security standards used by EMV cards, health care providers could help stop fraud. The smart cards use standards-based solutions that can help health care providers achieve new workflow automation that facilitates real-time payment authorization, increases patient health record security, improves patient identity management, and provides new auditing capabilities.

Issues of ownership responsibility and implementation cost have stalled smart card adoption for identity authentication within the U.S. health care industry; EMV payment migration is expected to stimulate interest in smart cards.

Payment terminals and systems are being converted to accept EMV and as this infrastructure expands, the costs associated with health care provider implementation and adoption of a smart card infrastructure decrease.

The health care industry could experience benefits if adoption is uniform and if the EMV chip infrastructure is leveraged for identity authentication. While certain standards may still need to be developed, uniform health care organization adoption of EMV and smart card-based identity authentication solutions can increase security, decrease payment vulnerability, reduce fraud and improve workflow for health care orgainzations.

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