eGovernment procedures provide to citizens easy to handle and fast services which stepwise replace traditional bureaucratic paper based contacts between governmental institutions and citizens. eHealth has the power – beside the simplification of administrative procedures – to secure and raise availability, accessibility and quality of health services. eHealth is an essential contributor for raising patient safety.

Of course there are overlaps between eGovernment and eHealth. One of these is a basic but central requirement for all sensible procedures: proper, secure and easy to handle identification and authentication, working also in cross border services. The EU-commission funded large scale pilots STORK and epSOS are working with this issue, finding out what are the common requirements, what are the differences and how to secure that future developments are not running in diverse directions.

Working on identity management in the health area is not reduced to unique identification of patients, but also on health professionals and health service institutions. Individual health data are handled as explicit sensible data and the definition and management of rights is essential for reaching a status which is conform to the legal systems in the member states, especially on data protection, and to build up a environment of trust which will allow patients and healthcare providers to use eHealth services, such as pan-institutional patient summary records or ePrescription systems.

In the epSOS project identity management is one of the essential tasks that have to be solved. The cooperation between STORK and epSOS has shown that requirements in the government and public health services are quite close. Some of the member states even use similar identification mechanisms while some of the member states have decided to keep the sectors apart. epSOS is trying to find solutions which are compatible with the national concepts of the participating countries.