HIC System Technical Components

The images present the card front face with visible information. The back side of the card provides brief handling instructions. Special cards have been designed for bilingual regions with equivalent presence of both statutory languages, Slovene - Hungarian or Italian.

The card includes the following electronic information:

•  identification number of the health insurance card holder (HIIS number),
• date of issue of the health insurance card,
• name and surname of the health insurance card holder.

Health insurance cards made after 5^th November 2008 also include a digital certificate with which the insured person allows health care professionals to access data in back office through the on-line system.

Technical features of health insurance cards made after 5^th November 2008:

• Java card 2.2.1,
• GlobalPlatform 2.1.1,
• ISO15408,
• PP SSCD Type 2 & 3 EAL4+,
• memory capacity of EEPROM = 72KB,
• includes an applied structure of information, cryptographic functions, and symmetric keys for mutual identification HPC – HIC for access to information on the health insurance card,
• enables identification, authentication, signing and encryption based on public key infrastructure, and (qualified) digital certificate,
• supports symmetric DES operations, DES3 (112 and 168 bit) and asymmetric RSA (1024, 2048 bit) encryption and hash operations SHA-1, SHA-256,
• enables an electronic signature and data encryption with digital certificates,
• has a life span of 10 years.

The supplier of cards is the French company Gemalto, which prepares the plastic, assembles the chip, provides basic electrical initialisation of the chip, and locks the card with transport keys. Cards are sent to company Cetis from Celje (Slovenia), which unlocks and personalises them: writes the information about the holder into the chip and on the card’s exterior, and ships them together with a cover letter to the home address of the holder. The annual volume of health insurance cards is approximately 106.000 (births, replacing lost and destroyed cards, changes of names etc.). There are over 2.1 million health insurance cards in use.