“…Aetna’s Chief Security Officer, Jim Routh, has been vocal in communicating the company’s plans to beef up security.”
American health insurance provider Aetna is moving forward with its plans to implement FIDO authentication standards, and the head of the FIDO Alliance is cheering the company on.
As FIDO Alliance Executive Director Brett McDowell notes in a new blog post, Aetna’s Chief Security Officer, Jim Routh, has been vocal in communicating the company’s plans to beef up security. Routh recently told The Wall Street Journal about Aetna’s addition of behavioral biometrics to its mobile and web applications, and has elsewhere lauded FIDO’s biometric authentication standard, which he said allows Aetna “to create consistency and simplify the entire authentication process.”
While Aetna joined FIDO’s Board of Directors well over a year ago, its rollout of its Next-Generation Authentication (NGA) platform is “a multi-year process” according to FIDO’s McDowell. And McDowell thinks it will have a big impact in the healthcare sector more broadly, anticipating “that other healthcare organizations will follow Aetna’s lead and either replicate or leverage the platform Aetna has put in place”.
Indeed, sophisticated security mechanisms like biometric authentication already appear to be getting some significant traction in the healthcare industry, with fingerprint reader provider BIO-key now reporting a substantial uptick in interest in Q2 of this year.
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