Horst Herb wrote: > On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:07, Tim Churches wrote: >> Horst or other native German speakers on this list: can you find out >> anything more about this via Google or whatever. I had a quick look at >> the Austrian Ministry for health and Women web site, but my German is >> not up to the task of spelunking through the site and its various >> documents. > > Can only do any extra work from next Tuesday on, flat out otherwise with not > enough hours to sleep on any one day > Happy to help then. If you need it earlier, maybe ask Barbara from the > nat-div > list?
No worries Horst, I understand. In fact, the Google translation service gives a rather charming translation of this page which conveys the gist of it: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.e-card.uta.at/uta.html If you click on the links in the red box there are a few more details. Basically it seems to be a smart card issued to people with certain types of medical insurance - the unemployed, the elderly, civil servants I think. The card holds various ID numbers for the person, demographic information about the holder (probably a photo too), a PKI key and some basic medical information. Each doctor's surgery is provided with a smartcard reader (which runs Linux) and a router which connects them to the Internet via a DSL broadband connection. When a patient attends a clinic (or hospital, or pharmacy), they insert their card which identifies them and authorises payment or sends details of the service to the medical insurer. The patient's ID number can be cut-and-paste from a browser interface which the smartcard reader provides on the doctor's LAN, or there is an API for direct querying by the doctor's own medical software. The smartcard reader box (which remember is really a small Linux server) also mediates secure medical data exchange and other services, include direct e-prescribing to pharmacies (the smartcard reader must include a certificate which identifies teh clinic and/or teh doctor, presumably). I think (but am not sure) that the basic hardware etc is provided free to the doctor (at the govt's expense?) but there are additional services which the doctor can pay for which use the same infrastructure. I think that this infrastructure is being rolled out to 12,000 medical clinics across Austria. Of course, I (or the Google translator) may have all or much of the foregoing completely wrong... Anyway, it seems like a very interesting model. I have no idea how much it is costing the Austrian govt, but they must consider it a wise investment else they would not be doing it. Nor do I know how open the whole thing is, but the use of an intelligent and extensible card reader based on Linux seems smart - presumably new capabilities can be remotely installed on these card reader devices as needed - and the source code for them is available! Why couldn't the Australian Medicare smartcard be part of a similar scheme? Too much co-operation between disparate govt depts, federal and State govts, public and private sectors would be needed for such a thing to ever fly here? Yeah, probably. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
