Digital Identity Systems for Healthcare Applications

In the last years, cross-border movements of people, goods and services have increased exponentially in Europe. To ease those activities and satisfy the new needs born from them, the EU Commission designs different plans taking advantage of Internet Network and digital innovation for the benefit of the European citizens. For this purpose, the CEF Digital Service Infrastructure (DSI) was set up by the Commission to finance different pan-European digital services in distinct fields (e.g., eHealth, Cybersecurity, e-Justice, e-Procurement). In the healthcare environment, the OpenNCP platform, which is part of the eHealth DSI project, aims to improve the QoS of European patients allowing the cross-border exchange of medical data and making national eHealth systems interoperable between each other. Through OpenNCP, an EU citizen can ask for medical treatment in another EU country, without worrying about prescriptions and his medical history: OpenNCP can retrieve this information in compliance with Member States' laws, in trust and security. However, this EU platform does not take care of patient identification, while the authentication of healthcare professionals is under the responsibility of the country where the treatment is required. Considering the electronic identification environment, the EU Commission provides eIDAS, i.e., another infrastructure that ensures interoperability between national identification schemes (eIDs) from the European States. With eIDAS, European citizens can access and use online public services in other EU countries more safely and reliably, employing their digital identity issued by their country of residence. The HEALTH-eID project aims to integrate the eIDAS cross-border authentication with the OpenNCP data exchange service, exploiting the digital identity of the foreign patient, which can authenticate himself in his country of origin via eIDAS before asking medical data in OpenNCP. This thesis's work describes the HEALTH-eID approach to solve the OpenNCP patient authentication issue, which consists of the development of a HeID connector that aims to increase trust and security providing a reliable authentication service ensured by eIDAS and a consensus management mechanism, in compliance with GDPR and eIDAS regulations.