• eTEN Home
  • About eTEN
    • eTEN Leaflet 
    • eTEN Brochure 
    • eTEN and Enlargement 
    • eTEN Themes 
  • eTEN Legal Reference Documents
  • eTEN Calls
  • eTEN Contacts
  • eTEN FAQ
  • eTEN How To
  • eTEN Library
  • eTEN News Room
  • eTEN Projects
  • eTEN Online Project Database
  • eTEN Site Map
  • eTEN Users Database
    (experts, partners, guests)

Alternate presentations:

ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: NETC@RDS (March 2004)

March 2004 Project of the Month: NETC@RDS

NETC@RDS - Trans-European Access to Health Services for mobile Citizens

Issues being addressed

During the last decade several EU Member-States like Germany or France issued smart cards (e.g. micro-processor cards in France or memory cards in Germany) as proof of entitlement for health care benefits-in-kind and/or as procedure simplification in the scheme of health care costs refunding procedure. Now, Austria and possibly Greece are planning to deploy social security smart cards at national scale within the next years.

Nevertheless, most of the smart card and IT networking applications that have been -or could be- deployed at national scale may be available only in the context of national regulation since they were designed for the national or regional health care information system. The services provided to citizens or residents by such systems are merely available abroad, even inside the EU.

Whence, due to the lack of interoperability in between national or local computerized and smart card based services in the area of inter-States Health insurance, people travelling within the EU for studies, work (E128 form applied) or for tourism (E111 form applied) must apply the old-fashion paper-form based procedure which is probably not compliant with a convergent policy to facilitate free movement of persons inside the EU by bringing down legal barriers to mobility and skills inside Europe.

 
Objectives

The eTEN project NETC@RDS follows the trails initiated during the R&D phase by NETLINK, TRANSCARDS and many other Pan-European initiatives as well as those currently being blazed in the framework of programmes supported by the European Commission (e.g. the E-Europe Smart Card Charter initiative).

The project consortium, as a core kernel on behalf of national authorities of the participating countries, will set a wide trans-European network of e-services for mobile citizens thus aiming to improve inter-State health care access procedure simplification at best quality of service as an overall objective. The target population is potentially every citizen travelling abroad inside any of the e-services deployment areas as student, temporary posted worker, tourist or for business purpose.

The NETC@RDS Consortium final objective is aiming to steering up a step-by-step full deployment of new services for mobile citizens within the whole EU.

The services offered in the frame of the NETC@RDS project will also contribute to let national health care systems being more consistent in between them while building-up interoperable information systems to bring out cross-border health care facilities on the market place.

 
Achievements

The consortium carried out the Market Validation and initiated a Pan-European Steering Committee that will develop a large trans-European consensus focused on the project's main goals, scope and objectives. The Consortium reached multilateral agreements to allow wide usage of Smart Cards combined with IT networking software applications in the scope of inter-States health care access entitlement inside the Union.

The Commission report on the European Health Insurance Card assigned to the Netc@rds consortium the task to prepare for the electronic phase of this card, starting in 2005. Accordingly, the project is now preparing a second phase during which it will implement pilot installations in several countries, and also extend the scope of the work to the back office procedures and systems for costs refunding between the health insurance organizations. In this new phase, the consortium will also be extended by further member states, both from the EU 15 and the accession countries.

This will also prepare the initial Deployment. Finally the Full Deployment phase could be planned at large EU scale, in line with the EHIC time schedule which foresees the use of the electronic health card for all Member states by 2008.

 
Reference data

Dedicated Web site: http://www.netcards-project.com/
Project Reference: eTEN-28029
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start date: 2002-09-01
Duration: 16 months
End Date: 2003-12-31