Gemalto To Provide E-Health Cards For German Insurance Organization
Gemalto recently announced it has been awarded the tender held by insurance organization AOK (Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse) to supply and personalize e-health-cards for their insured in Germany. The contract win comes after Gemalto took part in Germany’s first healthcare pilot program based on highly secure microprocessor cards.
With Gemalto’s digital healthcare solution, users will avoid duplicate examinations and therefore lessen unnecessary use of healthcare services. In addition, the new health card will be able to carry electronic prescriptions, which will reduce paperwork significantly. Finally, by allowing data update once the card is in the field, the new system enables insurance funds to potentially adjust their cost of ownership.
Gemalto’s latest-generation card will also act as an active security device to perform strong authentication of the patient, therefore contributing to reducing fraud costs and increasing privacy. It will enable secure access to an electronic medical file that will include emergency data such as blood group, allergy alerts and ongoing treatment records. Authorized healthcare professionals can read personal information only if the patient consents by entering the card’s PIN.
“Gemalto has been a long term partner to health insurance companies since the first generation of health cards back in the mid-90s. We are proud and honored by the decision of AOK to allow us to contribute massively to this program by providing German citizens with enhanced security and privacy management devices,” said Jacques Seneca, executive vice president of the security business unit at Gemalto. “The quality of our product developed in our Munich R&D center, the capabilities and flexibility of our production and personalization site in Filderstadt near Stuttgart, as well as our high level of commitment to this project have provided us with a strong competitive advantage when it comes to meeting the stringent requirements of rapid large-scale deployments such as this.”
The health program the German government is launching involves 80 million patients, 350,000 doctors and dentists, 2,000 hospitals and 22,000 pharmacies.
The German health service is highly decentralized, with some 250 different insurance companies, each having a separate infrastructure and supply process. The health insurance plans are either state-regulated or private. Around 90 percent of the population is covered by the state health insurance and the rest opt for private medical insurance. State health insurance beneficiaries do not have to pay for the visit to their doctor, nor for their medication (apart from a small fixed fee).
With the current system, insurance funds need to issue their customers with a new card whenever their administrative data change, whereas the microprocessor card-based system allows updating the information once the card is in the field, thus reducing operational costs. The electronic health card will carry the prescription and should make about 700 million handwritten prescriptions per year redundant.