Putting identifiers in the context of eHealth: introduction of a model.

eHealth is becoming an increasingly noteworthy domain in terms of public sector exploitation of information and communications technologies. Appro-priately identifying the users of electronic health systems is a major contem-porary challenge. The appropriate identification of eHealth systems’ and ser-vices’ users is one of its core areas of concern. This paper develops a particular problem statement that relates to the notion of identifiers in eHealth, outlines its conceptual background, and defines a set of solutions to the problem outlined. It lists a variety of use cases or examples against which the issues can be tested (these are further explored in a parallel paper [13]), and proposes some possibilities for future work. In particular, the paper de-scribes the results of a 2007 workshop that explored all of these notions. While the paper bases its orientations in a general European framework, the main examples and illustrations used by the authors come from experiences in the Netherlands.