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The German Electronic Health Card (EGK)

The German electronic Health Card is a complex application with many functionalities.
The application was planned to be introduced in Germany in 2006. The introduction was delayed because of reasons like open questions concerning the secrecy of patient data, total costs as well as missing encouragement of the doctors. Until the end of year 2012 fifty percent of the insured persons must have an electronic health card. However, this first version of the card stores the same personal data that is also available on the current card. More functionality is not supported yet.

In the SecureMDD project the electronic health card was considered as case study. Most of the protocols that were developed by gematik (the association that is responsible for the EGK) are obsolete at the moment. For this reason we decided to design our own protocols instead of using those developed by gematik.

This case study is much larger and more complex than other case studies we have investigated. For example, there are much more people and components that are participating in the protocols (e.g. doctors, pharmacists, patients, health cards, Heilberufsausweise (smartcards that are used to authenticate a doctor / pharmacist), the health cards, ..). Moreover, the electronic health card offers a lot of functionality and the protocols themselves are more complex than the ones of our other case studies.

The modeled electronic health card applications supports the following functionality:

Some security issues of the application are sketched in the following:

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