Austria shows the way with e-card:
This article was originally published in Clinica
Executive Summary
e-health cards for the entire 8 million population of EU member state Austria will have been delivered by November 2005. This means that the whole project, from the federation of Austrian social insurance organisations' commissioning of production from technology group Giesecke & Devrient (Munich, Germany) in April 2004, will have taken just over 18 months. The speed and comprehensive nature of the project has given Austria a leading position in the EU in efforts to modernise access to public health systems. The prime aim was to replace the national paper-based system of health vouchers, but the smart card has numerous other potential functionalities and is pre-set to operate as the citizen's card.