Confirm who a patient is, and what they are entitled to, at the counter or online.

The challenge in healthcare

Patient identification still relies on cards, letters and questions at the counter, and each provider runs its own check. When someone collects a prescription for a relative, or needs care in another Member State, staff have to judge unfamiliar documents and decide who may act for whom. Online services face the same questions, with registration flows that ask for more personal data than the service needs.

With a wallet, the patient shares an identity attestation, a health insurance card or an authorisation to act for someone else, and the provider verifies each one against its issuer, so staff can rely on the answer.

Where verification is needed

• Pharmacies: confirming identity before dispensing, including a cross-border prescription
• Collection for a relative: verifying the collector and, where the patient has issued an authorisation credential, their right to act for the patient
• Clinics and hospitals: registering patients and confirming coverage before treatment
• Digital health services and patient apps: verifying identity at sign-up and before access to records
• Health insurers: confirming the policyholder when a claim or a change is made

What Vidos does

• Vidos Authorizer requests the identity, coverage or authorisation attestations your service needs over OpenID4VP
• Vidos Verifier checks each credential's signature, issuer, expiry and revocation status (SD-JWT VC and mDoc)
• Selective disclosure keeps the request to the attributes the task needs, reducing the health and personal data you hold
• Vidos Validator applies your rules, such as matching the patient named on the prescription
• Every verification is logged for audit, so the record holds the result and no copies of patient documents

Regulatory context

The European Health Data Space Regulation (EU) 2025/327 gives patients the right to identify themselves with any eIDAS-recognised electronic identification means when they use electronic health data access services (Article 16), and requires Member States to provide proxy services through which people can authorise others to access their health data on their behalf (Article 4(2)). Electronic prescriptions and dispensations are priority data categories (Article 14), and the rules for them apply from 26 March 2029 (Article 105). Under Article 11 of the Cross-Border Healthcare Directive 2011/24/EU, a prescription issued in one Member State for a named patient can already be dispensed in another, where the medicine is authorised there.

Article 5f(2) of the eIDAS Regulation, as amended by Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, lists health among the sectors where private providers that must use strong user authentication have to accept the European Digital Identity Wallet at the user's request by 24 December 2027.

Read the e-prescription use case

Read the European Health Insurance Card use case