Interoperability of the electronic European Health Insurance Cards (WS/eEHIC) is a CEN/ISSS (European Committee for Standardization / Information Society for Standardization System) CEN WORKSHOP AGREEMENT (CWA) that describes a standardised solution (a specification) for the electronic European Health Insurance card (eEHIC) throughout EU. This document includes guidelines and recommendations for standards for an electronic European health Insurance Card.
Objectives
- Privacy: eEHIC data is safely stored, retrieved and used in the respect of data integrity in a confidential way, thanks to the eEHIC application on a smart card accessed by a CAD (client) application and the card and terminal functions;
- Interoperability: interoperable eEHIC environment using smart cards as tokens;
- Enable healthcare professionals to use an eEHIC in a similar way to the national or regional social security/health insurance cards they are used to.
Owner
The document has been developed through an Expert Project Team and the collaboration of contributing partners participating in European Committee for Standardization (CEN) Workshop eEHIC.
This Workshop Agreement is publicly available as a reference document from the CEN Members National Standard Bodies.
Intended audience
This document is likely to be of interest to any organization or individual involved in eEHIC deployment, including providers of smart card enabled terminals for access to public services and software developers of Healthcare related applications, as well as Health care providers, Insurance Bodies of the Member States, and European citizens.
Long description
This document provides:
- The definition of the dataset known as the Mandatory EHIC dataset;
- The rules for saving the dataset on the smart card;
- The basic principles that govern and support the implementation of the eEHIC as extended to multi-application smart cards;
- The definition of the metadata schemas that ensure interoperability
- A method to identify the presence of, and the method of access to, the EHIC dataset on the citizen’s smart card.
It also specifies:
- The eEHIC interoperability interface between the smart card and the Client Application residing on the Workstation or Card Accepting Device (CAD) itself;
- A logical format for exchange of eEHIC information between Healthcare Providers and Clearing Institutes;
- The relationship between the smart cards and the Electronic Exchange of Social Security Information infrastructure (EESSI).
The eEHIC CWA:
- provides an interoperability framework for the electronic health insurance card
- supports cross-border services
- supports both existing and new implementations
- is back-to-back compatible with ECC-3 (CEN/TS 15480-2)
- provides an interoperability framework for legacy systems
- an existing ECC card can migrate to become an eEHIC as well
- an eEHIC implementation can migrate to become an ECC as well
- a new system can be implemented to support both by design
- An existing citizen or health card system can migrate to become an eEHIC as well
The eEHIC CWA represents a European recognised (to be) profile upon which MS may build their interoperability implementation specifications.
Source[1]
How to participate
Comments or suggestions from the users of the CEN Workshop Agreement are welcome and should be addressed to the CEN Management Centre.
History / Key milestones
The production of this CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) was approved at the CEN/ISSS Workshop eEHIC (electronic European health insurance card) kick-off meeting on 24 April 2007.
This document was endorsed at the plenary meeting on 10 March 2009 and electronically with an electronic round which ended on 30 April 2009.
The European Committee for Standardization / Information Society for Standardization System - CEN / ISSS Workshop on 'Interoperability of the electronic European Health Insurance Cards' (WS/eEHIC) aimed at preparing a white paper. This paper intended to complement the CEN/ISSS CEN WORKSHOP AGREEMENT (CWA).
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