Social security and healthcare cards
Belgium:
Banque Carrefour de la Sécurité Sociale (BCSS) or Kruispuntbank van de Sociale
Zekerheid (Crossroads Bank for Social Security) and the SIS Card
The SIS Card, issued to over 8 million Belgians aged 18 and over, provides a reliable means of electronic identification for social security contributors:
- With social security institutions,
- With employers,
- With other authorities that send information concerning the cardholder to the social security organization and the administration for direct social security contributions.
The SIS Card gives access to over 39 social services in Belgium, and covers social organizations, pharmacies, hospitals and provides information on patients’ situations for recipients not integrated into the BCSS network.
The Banque Carrefour today connects over 2,000 businesses and 190 social organizations.
The SIS Card contains data visible to the naked eye:
- Name, 1st and 2nd forenames, date of birth, gender, social security
number, card number and date of issue.
It contains electronically readable data:
- A label showing it is an SIS card,
- The insurance organization’s identification number,
- An affiliation number to the insurance organization,
- The status of the insured person in terms of healthcare,
- The expiry date of the card.phone.
A powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool receives some 15,000 calls per month. 16 million people are listed in the directory. Each person has dealings with an average of 8 social security players.
The following developments are planned in the short term:
- The function of electronic identification will be taken over by the e-ID card after it has been generally adopted,
- The function of proving that citizens are insured in the healthcare
sector will be replaced by:
Secure
online access for healthcare providers to data concerning the insurance
status of their patients, available from insurance organizations in return
for the usage of the Belgian e-ID card,
Electronic identification and authentication of healthcare service
providers, - The SIS Card will be kept on for insured persons who do not have an e-ID card (those who do not live in Belgium, children under the age of 12 etc.),
- Meanwhile, SIS Card readers will be updated to be able to read e-ID cards.
The Belgian Banque Carrefour de la Sécurité Sociale – a model
This virtually paperless model of interoperability, put into place for a very wide-reaching community of sovereign and independent organizations, was not only facilitated by the exemplary nature of its model collaborative architecture, but also by the skillful management of roles and mandates. This enabled the construction of a central information distribution hub whose management totally preserves citizens’ rights to data and personal information protection.
This project has won the prestigious “Global e-Government Best Practice
Award” 2006 from the UN. Its instigator, and president of the BCSS, Frank
Robben, also acts as an advisor to numerous Pan-European interoperability
projects.