DC4EU WP 6 – Methodology

A sustainable solution can be seen as a combination of several products and trust services that enables users to securely request, obtain and store their social security information allowing them to access online services, share data about them and electronically sign/seal documents.

The ARF guarantees that security and privacy issues are solved through the EUDI wallet capabilities and different standard interfaces and protocols which allow the interactions with other products and services.

The preparation and execution of large-scale pilots for several business cases will be the basic instrument to design, test and implement a scalable architecture for social security coordination. Due to the organizational heterogeneity of the social security domain in Europe, the introduction of such an approach with the technologies and frameworks mentioned above requires a sequential approach to reach the level of maturity for moving into production.

The WP6 covers the key implementation activities for business centred testing and piloting of entitlement documents use cases (“Cross-Border Journeys”) on a large scale.  All activities will rely on the EIDAS reference implementations, available EBSI infrastructure and implementations provided by DC4EU in pre-production environment.

The following business cases are selected for the large-scale piloting in Work Package 6:

Portable Document (“PDA1”) – Statement of applicable legislation. Useful to prove that you pay social contributions in another EU country – if you are a posted worker or work in several countries at the same time. Estimations based on numbers from the program “Electronic Exchange of social Security information (EESSI)” show a size of more than 2 million PDA1 documents yearly issued in Europe.

Electronic Health Insurance Card (“EHIC”) – This is a free card that provides every citizen with access to medically necessary government-provided healthcare during a temporary stay in one of the 27 EU countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, under the same conditions and at the same cost (free in some countries) as persons insured in that country. The services covered include, for example, services related to chronic or existing illnesses, as well as in connection with pregnancy and childbirth.  Currently approx. 400 million EU citizens are equipped with an EHIC.

The piloting initiative will serve as a reference and best-practice for other documents in social security which could be issued as a verifiable credentials:

1. S1 – Certificate of entitlement to healthcare if you don’t live in the country where you are insured. Useful for posted workers, cross-border workers, pensioners and civil servants and their dependants.
2. S2 – Authorisation to obtain planned health treatment in another EU or EFTA country. You should be treated the same as a resident of that country – you may have to pay a percentage of the costs up front.
3. S3 – Certificate of entitlement to healthcare in your former country of employment. Useful for retired cross-border workers who are no longer insured in their former country of employment.
4. U1 – Statement of insurance periods to be taken into account when calculating an unemployment benefit.
5. U2 – Authorisation to continue receiving unemployment benefit while looking for a job in another country.
6. U3 – Circumstances likely to affect the entitlement to unemployment benefits. It informs the employment services of the country paying your benefits of changes in your situation which may lead to a revision of your benefit payments.
7. DA1 – Entitles you to receive medical treatment under special conditions reserved for accidents at work and occupational diseases in another EU country
8. P1 – The summary of pension decisions provides an overview of the decisions taken in your case by the various institutions in the EU countries from which you have claimed an old age, survivors, or invalidity pension.

The piloting initiative will provide feedback towards the ARF for including additional functionalities and services for the benefits of all business domains.