Smartcard--a vehicle of access to the health care services

This paper presents an outline of the Slovenian national project of introduction of the health insurance card system: the background, the grounds for its launching and benefits anticipated, system design, project phases, and interoperability with international healthcard systems. The system promises to simplify appreciably the administrative procedures currently required in the patient's daily encounters with the health care system, to benefit both the patient, the health care professionals and the insurance providers; as well as to provide the health care professionals with a new tool of accessing the networked information technology resources. In addition, the system cost-benefit analyses indicate significant economic benefits, which is a significant contribution to the containment of health care service. In the present environment of trans-border mobility, the significance of international interoperability of any social service system is equally significant as its internal efficiency. Consequently, the issues of compliance to international technology and interoperability standards have been assigned the same high priority as the issues of technological features of the proposed solution in the system design and implementation phase.