Infineon Technologies AG, the world's leading supplier of integrated circuits (ICs) for chip cards, announced that it is the sole chip supplier for the largest patient healthcare card in United States. Siemens, Mount Sinai Medical Center and Elmhurst Hospital Center have formed a health smart card alliance to deploy up to 1.2 million patient health smart cards to link as many as 45 affiliated and related medical facilities in the New York metro area. The patient health smart card trial has begun late 2006 and is scheduled to end in 2007. In 2008, the health smart card alliance expects to issue approximately 500,000 smart cards which integrate a highly secure Infineon microcontroller.

The patient health smart cards are issued by the affiliated and related medical facilities with the patient's printed photo. To use the card, the patient inserts the card into a card reader and enters a private, personal identification number (PIN) to unlock the data on the smart card security crypto-controller. The crypto-controller securely stores the demographic data for the patient, including name, gender, contact information; allergies; current medical history; and lab results. The patient card is based on the Health Card Solution of Siemens and meets the US Food and Drug Administration's requirements for Class 1 medical devices that are mandatory to introduce medical products or services.

"The ideal concept of having integrated care across all hospitals and institutions will take a while," said Doris Hermann, Vice President and General Manager, Security and Identity Management, Siemens AG. "Using a smart card is a way in between. Because first you have the advantages of data on the card, then we can help hospitals to gradually migrate towards even more sophisticated IT concepts."

"Compared to the current method of using paper documents, smart card technology improves administrational efficiency and patient safety by providing accurate medical data and insurance coverage information," said Dr. Helmut Gassel, Vice President and General Manager, Chip Card and Security ICs, Infineon Technologies. "Infineon is committed to serving the health card industry. This programme has the potential to further initiate patient smart cards throughout the US."

Today, Infineon provides its secure microcontroller chips to the world's largest national patient cards, health insurance cards and social security cards, including Italy, Taiwan, Slovenia, Spain, India, Poland, Great Britain, and Germany.

The patient health smart card initiative uses a smart card operating system (OS) of Siemens. This OS is embedded onto the highly-secure contact-based Infineon smart card controller SLE 66CX680PE. The high-performance crypto-controller features an integral security concept providing multiple levels of physical protection and encryption and is certified according to Common Criteria "EAL 5+ high" certification. It offers 68 Kbytes of EEPROM, 196 Kbytes of ROM, and 4 Kbytes of RAM.