Austrian Health Insurance Agency: A Matter of Health

At the turn of the century, Austria’s public health insurance practices were on the verge of a major change. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Microsoft’s .NET were new on the market, and, adding SAP into the mix, these services hadn’t been tried. However, Austria’s four public health insurance agencies needed to move from paper-based processes and 20-year-old legacy systems to something that would be flexible enough to manage public accident insurance well into the future.

These agencies serve more than 5 million citizens who are students, in training for employment or already in the workforce. Led by the Allgemeine Unfallversicherungsanstalt (AUVA), which covers approximately 3 million employed persons and 1.3 million school children and students. The four-agency consortium also includes:

• Sozialversicherungsanstalt der Bauern (SVB), which provides public insurance for more than 1 million self-employed Austrians in agriculture and forestry and their dependents;


• Versicherungsanstalt öffentlich Bediensteter (BVA), which serves more than 250,000 tenured civil servants; and


• Versicherungsanstalt für Eisenbahnen und Bergbau (VAEB), which covers more than 70,000 Austrian railway and Vienna Transport Authority employees.

In some cases, the hardware used to run the agencies’ legacy systems was no longer supported. Pressure to consolidate the country’s public health insurance IT systems was also growing. It was time for change.

Looking for a leader

In 2002, AUVA, as project leader and application service provider for the other three agencies, looked for a company willing to lead the development of a new financial compensation system. The new system would manage Austria’s complete accident process from receiving notice of a work-related accident or disease through handling payments for medical treatment, rehabilitation and pensions.

The consortium asked CSC to lead a project team of representatives from the agencies as well as technology firms, including Siemens, Microsoft and SAP. Under the project, CSC, who has a 15-year legacy supporting Austria’s social insurance and health market, would provide project management, architecture, analysis, software design and development, quality assurance, roll out management and system integration services.

A strategic decision

It was a strategic decision for the consortium to use these technologies and migrate from their legacy systems to one platform. The benefits included new electronic records management capabilities and a readiness for e-government initiatives. The challenges included transitioning from four legacy systems based on different platforms as well as integrating the agencies’ different requirements and political interests into the solution.

A national system

The new system, which has replaced paper records, is now managing more than 1.7 million electronic records and processing about 180,000 new accidents a year. It has also given the agencies new flexibility, such as the ability to handle cases irrespective of place, provide immediate case information to an insured and configure workflows to various criteria.

Supporting four branch and five field service locations for the AUVA, plus 11 locations for the other agencies, the new system also provides greater security. It keeps records of all relevant activities, including changes in accident cases, and can reconstruct those activities as well as restrict access to medical cases.

The new system is also more cost efficient because the agencies can do more with less people and for less cost and have better control over their processes. They can also keep better insurance information, enabling them to generate more statistics and measurements, which in turn can be used to improve work conditions and prevent accidents.