User Centricity in Healthcare Infrastructures

The introduction of electronic national identity management solutions is accompanied by cheers and bravos from the contributors, but also by doubts and worries from data protection experts. Helping at clearing the view on the actual features and properties of the planned German electronic healthcare infrastructure, we have mapped the parts of the healthcare infrastructure to a taxonomy on user centricity in identity management. That mapping opens perspectives in two directions. On the one hand, a clear analysis of the security of identity data can be reached. On the other hand, future applications building upon the electronic healthcare infrastructure will benefit from that mapping and the abstraction layer it suggests. We show that an additional layer of abstraction will bring huge and complex identity management systems forward to a better understanding of their opportunities and threats and a fairer discussion leading to a better user acceptance.