The paper presents the evaluation of a concept of an electronic health insurance card (karta ubezpieczenia zdrowotnego, KUZ), which is planned to be introduced by the Ministry of Health as a broadened functionality of payment cards issued by banks. The document in question, together with related teleinformatics systems, has a significant potential to improve the quality of the management of citizens’ rights to public healthcare services and improve the control over public spending on the public healthcare system. However, taking into account the relationship between the card and identification security of citizens, as well as the value of services managed with the use of KUZ cards, the cards should be considered important in the context of the national security. Implementing a KUZ functionality into payment cards would not meet the fundamental conditions related to this type of documents, i.e. (1) widespread usage of KUZ cards, (2) a required level of personal data protection of patients and their identification security. Moreover, it is very likely that a payment card with implemented KUZ functionality would not be properly protected against forgery, counterfeiting and falsification due to relatively high costs imposed on banks. This implies that KUZ cards should be issued either as separate documents or as a functionality added to electronic identification documents which are planned to be introduced by the government.

Key words: health insurance card, KUZ, identification security, personal data.