Use Case
800,000 verified messages. Every month.
HIN is replacing 25+ years of legacy S/MIME infrastructure with Stargate — now processing 800,000+ verified messages per month across Swiss healthcare.
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The challenge
HIN (Health Info Net) operates Switzerland's health information network — the communication backbone connecting hospitals, GP practices, laboratories, pharmacies, and care institutions across the country. For over 25 years, the HIN Mail Gateway handled sensitive health data exchange using S/MIME domain encryption, the standard of its era.
By the early 2020s, three converging pressures in Swiss healthcare made it clear that the existing infrastructure needed a fundamental rethink — not just an upgrade:
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Data-driven care
Increasing volumes of clinical data — diagnostic results, referrals, prescriptions, care plans — now cross institutional boundaries as a matter of routine. Each crossing requires verified provenance: recipients need to know not just that a message arrived, but who sent it and that it has not been altered. Domain-level encryption cannot provide per-message sender verification.
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Decentralized and at-home care
Care delivery is moving beyond hospital walls. Home care, telemedicine, cross-cantonal collaboration, and multi-provider care teams require secure communication between participants who may have no pre-established trust relationship. A gateway model designed for a closed network of known institutions does not extend to these new communication patterns.
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Cost and efficiency pressures
Legacy infrastructure maintenance costs were rising while healthcare budgets contracted. The 25-year-old gateway required ongoing certificate management, bilateral trust agreements between domains, and specialist maintenance overhead — all for infrastructure that was becoming a constraint rather than an enabler.
The challenge HIN faced was not a minor technical upgrade. It required replacing the trust model at the foundation of Swiss healthcare communication — without disrupting a network that processes millions of sensitive messages annually and serves as critical infrastructure for the Swiss health system.
Switzerland has one of the highest standards for data protection and patient safety worldwide. Meeting that standard requires trust infrastructure that does not depend on a central provider. That is exactly what Vereign has prepared together with us for the future: an architecture where every organisation controls its digital identity sovereignly. This strategic alignment between HIN and Vereign is no accident: it stems from a shared understanding of how digital sovereignty must work in healthcare. The collaboration is enriching, reliable, and honest. Simply getting things done, as equals.
The solution
Vereign and HIN began a structured collaboration in March 2023, with a proof of concept exploring whether Mail over SSI — secure, verifiable email communication using decentralized identity — could replace the gateway model without disrupting existing workflows.
Following two successful proof of concept phases, Vereign deployed SEAL (Secure Authentic Exchange Layer) as the starting point of what would become the communication layer on top of Stargate. Rather than replacing the email infrastructure HIN's participants already use from the onset, SEAL uses encrypted swarm delivery to securely deliver messages to insecure edge devices with assurance of the authenticity of the sender. Recipients can independently access their messages, be sure they haven't been altered or intercepted, and can reply securely to their doctor.
From HIN's perspective, the ongoing operational transformation is significant: After 25 years of S/MIME primacy, SEAL marks the start of a progressive deployment of Stargate that is more resilient, more auditable, and architecturally capable of extending to the new care patterns Swiss healthcare is adopting. Vereign supports HIN in ongoing operations — providing 2nd and 3rd level support, contributing to product development, and building the technical competency within HIN's organisation for the long-term transformation journey.
Technical detail
From S/MIME to Stargate
The legacy HIN Mail Gateway was built on S/MIME domain encryption — a certificate model where trust anchors at the domain level and is managed by centralized certificate authorities. This model worked well for a closed network where HIN itself could vouch for every participant, but it creates structural limitations when healthcare communication needs to cross institutional and domain boundaries reliably.
SEAL was deployed as the first step in this transition — introducing encrypted swarm delivery for secure communication with recipients outside the HIN network. Stargate builds on this foundation with DKMS-based identity (Decentralised Key Management System), where each participant holds their own cryptographic identity anchored to a distributed key event log (KERI). There is no central authority that can be a single point of failure, revoked, or compromised.
Stargate will retain full S/MIME capabilities, ensuring backward compatibility with legacy gateways and institutions outside the Swiss healthcare domain. This enables an organic migration over time — no forced cutover, no disruption to existing trust relationships — while progressively establishing a more resilient, more auditable, and more scalable trust infrastructure.
Deployment timeline
The partnership began as a structured proof of concept in March 2023 and progressed through rigorous validation stages to full production deployment. The timeline below shows each milestone from first POC through the 2026 national rollout.
Architecture overview
The Stargate platform operates as a mesh of trust nodes. Each participating organization — in HIN's case, hospitals, GP practices, laboratories, and care institutions — connects through a Stargate gateway that handles identity management, message authentication, credential verification, and policy enforcement locally.
The rollout follows a phased approach. In 2026, the target is replacing the gateways in hospitals and other institutions with Stargate nodes. In 2027, the focus shifts to HIN Clients in GP offices across Switzerland. This multi-year transition, supported by Vereign, allows the network to scale progressively without the disruption of a forced migration.
For full architectural detail, see the Stargate platform page.
The results
800,000+
verified messages per month
850+
gateways across Swiss healthcare
30,000+
GP offices and healthcare institutions
Today, the Stargate deployment processes 800,000+ encrypted and verified messages per month across Swiss healthcare. Every message is individually authenticated — the sender's identity verified, the content cryptographically signed, and an auditable evidence trail maintained for every exchange.
The partnership has evolved far beyond its origins as a technology pilot. Vereign and HIN now operate as deep technology and business partners: Vereign supports HIN in day-to-day operations, provides 2nd and 3rd level escalation support, contributes to HIN's product development roadmap, and is actively building the technical competency within HIN's organisation for the full transformation journey ahead.
Looking ahead, the rollout follows a phased approach: in 2026, 850+ gateways in hospitals and institutions across Switzerland will be replaced with Stargate nodes. In 2027, the focus shifts to HIN Clients in GP offices — progressively establishing Stargate as the trust layer for Swiss healthcare communication at national scale.
2026–2027 roadmap
850+ gateways in hospitals and institutions
Replacing legacy S/MIME gateways with Stargate nodes across Swiss hospitals and healthcare institutions — establishing bilateral trust infrastructure at institutional scale.
HIN Clients in GP offices
Extending Stargate to individual GP practices across Switzerland — completing the transformation from legacy communication infrastructure to the national trust network.
Beyond healthcare
The trust architecture deployed for HIN is not specific to healthcare. Any environment where sensitive communication crosses organizational boundaries — where the identity of a sender and the integrity of a message must be independently verifiable without relying on a central authority — faces the same structural challenge.
In financial services, cross-institutional compliance workflows and regulatory reporting demand the same end-to-end verifiability. In government, cross-agency identity federation and secure inter-ministry communication require a trust model that works beyond a single organization's perimeter. In supply chain, provenance verification across multiple jurisdictions and logistics partners requires exactly the kind of decentralized, auditable trust layer that Stargate provides.
What HIN validated at national scale in healthcare is deployable wherever regulated communication crosses organizational boundaries. The proof is already in production.
Ready to replace legacy trust infrastructure?
Stargate is running at national scale in Swiss healthcare. Tell us about your regulated environment — we will map the deployment path in a 30-minute call.