The group also recommends new efforts at “bootstrapping,” by allowing healthcare organizations to make use of confirmed identities managed by other reliable parties, such as financial institutions.

The group recommends a federal commitment to researching the reliability of in-person and online identity management methods.

“People should not have to put their privacy at risk in order to participate in innovations that promise to improve healthcare, access to care, and consumer control over their own information,” said Janlori Goldman, director of the Health Privacy Project and a member of the research faculty at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

“No solution is fool-proof,but we are calling on the government to take a more vigorous leadership role in measuring the accuracy of identity-proofing methods, so that we can be more secure that people are who they say they are when accessing and sharing their health information,” Goldman said.

“We conclude that the authentication challenge is manageable today,” said David Lansky, senior director of the Markle Foundation Health Program. “And we are encouraged that new technologies and even policy innovations will remove today’s barriers that prevent organizations from sharing electronic information with consumers.”