An Open eCard Plug-in for accessing the German national Personal Health Record

Abstract

An important future application of the German electronic health card (elektronische Gesundheitskarte, eGK) is the national Personal Health Record (PHR), because it enables a citizen to store and retrieve sensitive medical data in a secure and self-determined manner. As the stored data is encrypted with an eGK- specific certificate and retrieving the encrypted data is only possible after TLS- based authentication, the citizen needs to use a so called “PHR Citizen Client”, which allows to use the eGK for strong authentication, authorization, and decryption purposes. Instead of building such an application from scratch, this paper proposes to use the Open eCard App and its extension mechanism for the efficient creating of a PHR Citizen Client by developing an Open eCard Plug-in for accessing the German national Personal Health Record.