Public Key Infrastructure Issues in an Academic Healthcare Setting

Planning a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) deployment in a healthcare environment is a challenge that has unique aspects, determined by the nature of the healthcare business and by the user community the PKI intends to support. Addressing a mixed environment, academic and healthcare, adds complexity to the problem because of the mixed IT infrastructure likely to be seen in such environments and because of user education issues. The paper intends to give a general overview several specific issues related to the PKI deployment process emphasizing the particularities of a mixed environment. We assume that the reader is familiar with the functions various components of a PKI should perform.