A small Cambridge, Mass. company is one of the first to provide solutions for Signatures and Authentication for Everyone (SAFE). SAFE is an industry effort to use software to manage the digital identities of employees.

SAFE-BioPharma Association is a global identity management coalition founded by AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, and Sanofi-Aventis. SAFE delivers standardized identity credentials that can be used for authentication and electronic signing by bio-pharmaceutical and healthcare providers. These credentials are legally enforceable and comply with industry regulations. Cost savings from the removal of redundant identity credentials in the industry have been conservatively estimated by SAFE to be more than $200 million annually.

The SAFE standard is recognized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA). “SAFE is a major step forward, not only for a very large and very important industry, but also as a model for the way in which leading companies in an industry cooperate to cut costs by moving to standards-based solutions that can scale globally,” said Phil Libin, president of CoreStreet.