(disclosure: I serve in the board of Firmaprofesional, a start-up providing digital identity and electronic signature solutions. I hope, however, that I will be able to keep an unbiased point of view to share with you)

Healthcare professionals need secure communications and transactions when they offer their services through electronic means. They need to “sign” documents on the electronic marketplace in the same way they have been doing for years in the “real” marketplace.

To solve this need, a “digital identity” or “digital certificate” may be stored in a smartcard, a pendrive, or any other vehicle suitable for “transporting” it. This digital identity enables its users to authenticate both sides of a “conversation” (or a transaction) taking place on the internet.

Electronic signature will be a pervasive element of everything done in healthcare in the next ten years. Electronic prescription, medical electronic records, telemedicine, all initiatives "take place" within a digital conversation among interested parties (hospitals, physicians, patients, companies…), and this conversation will require strong and compliant systems to authenticate both sides of it.

I see electronic signature as an enabling technology. Once in place, it will allow many other initiatives that would be nonsense without it.