Fraunhofer study backs German smartcard plans

Germany’s health smartcard project uses up-to-date technology and is suitable to guarantee both data security and accessibility. This is the key message of a new study conducted by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS).

The Fraunhofer scientists did their analysis for the working group 7 of the National IT Summit, a joint effort of politicians, scientists and industry representatives to bring forward information and communication technologies in Germany.

The National IT Summit was initiated two years ago by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. It consists of several working groups, with working group 7 focused on “ICT and health”.

“We have taken the specifications for hardware and software tools and analysed if they are state-of-the-art”, said head of Fraunhofer FOKUS, Professor Radu Popescu-Zeletin.

The conclusion Prof Popescu told E-Health Europe was: “The infrastructure can provide data security and accessibility as envisioned.”

Specifically, he mentioned the approach to use service oriented architecture, which was in line with what is already established in many e-government scenarios, he said.

He also agreed with the decision to set up a public key infrastructure: “This is a good tool to organize an identity and accessmanagement in a heterogeneous and distributed environment.”

Overall, Prof Popescu said there were no technical reasons to further delay the roll out of the electronic health cards in Germany. “They are a suitable tool for accessing patient data. The security architecture should be implemented and quickly developed further towards electronic patient records.”

FOKUS is a publicly funded R&D centre that is, among other things, specialised on e-government systems. The new study is the first time the centre has been involved in healthcare and the German health smartcard project. So the new study can be considered as reasonably independent.

The study comes at another critical moment for the German smartcard project: this week, German doctors gather to their annual summit, or parliament, in the city of Ulm. One of the topics they will discuss is the smartcard project.

Many German doctors fear a loss of privacy when patient data is stored electronically on “central servers”. Some of them argue that USB-security tokens should be used instead of a nation-wide infrastructure to store and carry personal medical data.

These arguments were fuelled just days ago by an announcement of the German AIDS Aid, an influential patient organisation. The AIDS aid said it was also critical of the electronic health insurance card and warned of “gigantic server farms”.

This is certainly not what the smartcard project is about. But professional’s perceptions and misconceptions appear almost important as truth at this stage.

The Fraunhofer study concludes that hardware security tokens without a central infrastructure are not an option for data storage in healthcare. “Neither privacy nor accessibility can be guaranteed by hardware security tokens”, says the study.