Java-powered network switches and smartcard readers enable healthcare providers to read patient records and transmit health records to the SVC data center.

Today all insured citizens get a smartcard that verifies their insured status and facilitates the creation, transmission, and storage of electronic health records. The e-card system also authorizes citizens to avail themselves of a variety of e-health services, from preventive checkups to disease management programs. Thousands of healthcare providers have installed special equipment to scan the smartcards and transmit secure data across a secure health information network that spans the Austrian nation and extends to many other European countries within the scope of the NETC@RDS project of the European Union. Java is the lingua franca of the system.

“We chose Java because of the platform advantages, especially its tremendous portability among CPUs and hardware platforms,” says Rainer Schügerl, director of software development and security at SVC, a public entity based in Vienna, Austria, that develops innovative solutions in the field of health telematics and e-government. SVC served as the systems integrator for the e-card project.

“Java provides a stable, high-quality pro-
gramming language that suits all of our
needs,” Schügerl adds. “For enterprise-
caliber development requiring high avail-
ability, reliability, and security, most Austrian
organizations use Java.”
SVC has made a
giant step forward in
improving the quality of
medical care for citizens
throughout Austria and
beyond. By implement-
ing the e-card infra-
structure, the agency
replaced a cumbersome
system of paper health
insurance vouchers that had dominated
Austria’s medical world for 50 years. Manual
processes between insured people, employers,
doctors, hospitals, and the Main Association of
Austrian Social Security Institutions have been
systematically replaced by electronic solutions
and e-business procedures governing the
transmission, storage, processing, and virtual-
ization of health and administrative data.

SECURE INFRASTRUCTURE The Main Association of Austrian Social Security Institutions is a group of statutory insurance providers that is responsible for the country’s health, pension, and accident insurance. The association enlisted SVC to design and deploy the e-card system and an associated virtual private network. As a 100 percent subsidiary company of the Main Association of Austrian Social Security Institutions, SVC has a proven track record of enforcing transparency and security in the processing of health and administrative data, whether for clinical use, administration, or science. Its mission is to improve the efficiency of information processes among patients, health service providers, and health administrators.

Schügerl has 40 software engineers on his team, including 20 Java developers. Due to the sensitive nature of health and medical information, the team needed a programming language with a robust security architecture. They decided to use Java Standard Edition for Embedded Devices, which supports the same platforms and functionality as Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), along with additional capabilities for the embedded market such as support for small-footprint Java runtime environments (JREs), headless configurations, and memory optimizations. Java SE is ubiquitous on servers and desktop computers, thanks to its high-performance virtual machine and exceptional graphics support. To top it off, it has an extremely lightweight deployment architecture and a complete set of features and libraries for programmers.

Java applets are ideal for smartcards and
similar small-memory devices because they
carry all the essential security features such
as cryptography, authentication, authoriza-
tion, and public key infrastructure.
For SVC, these features ensure
that new e-card applications can
securely access centralized re-
sources while protecting critical
data from theft, loss, and corrup-
tion. The Java API supports a wide
range of cryptographic services
including digital signatures, mes-
sage digests, ciphers, message
authentication codes, key genera-
tors, and key factories, allowing
SVC developers to easily integrate security
into their application code.