An approach of a telematics infrastructure for the German electronic health card

Today information and communication technologies represent an important part of our life. Over the years, these technologies and regular innovations have led to a changed community, who recognizes the advantages of these technologies. Irrespective of the branch of trade, each company and all actors connected can benefit from such innovations, which enable effective and efficient operations in their daily processes. In Germany, the e-health sector is especially focused at this time on the new e-health card concept, which is currently in the testing stage and should be established within the next years. This e-health card will totally change the current system due to several new functions. Some of these functions are compulsory for the enrollees, while other functions are optional. With these innovations, the actors are confronted with several advantages and disadvantages. A sensitive aspect here is data protection and data security. Furthermore, the development of a new telematics infrastructure is an important topic within this German project, because the different actors need to be connected via the Internet and therefore, data security and data protection is a fundamental requirement for the e-health card implementation. © 2010 IEEE.