In many industries, such as health care, banking, and finance, the protection and ensuring of a person's privacy is often considered a top priority. In certain cases, ensuring privacy may also be mandated by law. Thus, various health care services, providers, and stakeholders (i.e. a doctor, nurse, or the like) may implement processes and methods that ensure that a person's Protected Health Information (PHI) is secure and shared with the actual person whose health the information is about. In the banking, credit, and finance industries, both Protected Individual Information (PII) and Protected Credit Information (PCI) are secured and shared with the person to whom the information belongs. PHI, PII, and PCI are of great value and can be targets for theft by hackers who can resell the information.
In the present health care industry, various health care services exist that allow a care giver, a hospital, or other relevant health care provider stakeholder to provide services to a patient. In providing health care, the various stakeholders may access private information about a patient or a group of patients and their Protected Health Information (PHI) and Protected Identity Information (PII) in order to provide the health care services. Other service-oriented industries are similar, such as a teller accessing the PII or Protected Credit Information (PCI) of a bank customer, or a credit authorization agent verifying the PII and PCI of a credit card user to permit a financial transaction to be completed.
The services to retrieve and access PHI, PCI and PII may be guarded by one or more security firewalls, each of which requires an authentication process to get beyond to access the information. The authentication process may be referred to in healthcare or other industries as authentication, identity authentication, or identity verification.