Packaging
Major Health Insurance Fund Awards Contract for Electronic Healthcare Cards to Giesecke & Devrient
Wednesday 16. July 2008 - Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) has won a contract from the German health insurer Kaufmännische Krankenkasse (KKH) and 28 corporate health insurance funds to manufacture and supply around ten million electronic healthcare cards.
The delivery scope includes optical and electronic personalization of the smart cards with individual data relating to the insured persons and their insurers. G&D will also be dispatching the new insurance cards to the insured, with roll-out scheduled to start in January 2009.
“We were convinced by the sophisticated technical concept, coupled with Giesecke & Devrients experience of major projects in the healthcare sector,” is how KKH chairman Ingo Kailuweit summarizes the organizations choice, following a Europe-wide call for tenders to find the most suitable supplier. Medical data are highly sensitive, and data protection is a prime consideration in such a project. G&D is so far the only manufacturer to have been awarded an IT security certificate by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) for cards issued in test regions.
Hans Wolfgang Kunz, head of the Government Solutions business unit at G&D, commented that “Giesecke & Devrient has worked tremendously hard to develop and implement a powerful technical system for the electronic health insurance card. Our customers benefit from state-of-the-art technology and absolute precision in our smart-card production. We deliver the perfect complete package solution.”
The electronic health insurance card will initially store the policyholders basic data, such as their name, address, date of birth and health insurance fund, along with details of insurance coverage and the persons status regarding supplementary charges. A photo of the cardholder provides additional protection against misuse of the card. The new smart card will in the first instance be used for electronic prescriptions and is already designed to store a qualified electronic signature that legally and technically replaces the need for users to sign by hand. This feature would make it possible for holders of an electronic healthcare card to identify themselves to authorities in areas such as e-government applications.
Insured persons have the option of ordering a “PIN Home Package” from the KKH. This contains a special card reader and software for connection to a home PC. It allows insured persons to check their current basic data or emergency information voluntarily stored on the card at any time.
Giesecke & Devrient is a leader of innovation in telematics applications to modernize the healthcare sector. Roughly every fourth smart card in Germanys electronic healthcare sector comes from G&D. In addition to the smart card itself, the Munich-based technology company is to supply a powerful background system that will control all the functions in the lifecycle of some 70 percent of all health insurance cards in Germany. The technology from Munich has proven itself many times over in Germany, where the electronic healthcare card was introduced in various regions for test purposes, as well as in international projects in Taiwan and Austria.