HIS (Hinweis- und Informationssystem)

What is the HIS?

The HIS (Hinweis- und Informationssystem der Versicherungswirtschaft) is the German insurance industry's shared information system. Insurers use it to make risk assessment more efficient and to counter fraud. It works like a credit-reference agency for insurance, and it is supervised under German and EU data-protection law. Since 1 October 2025 it is operated by Besurance HIS GmbH in Wiesbaden, which took over from informa HIS GmbH.

Which insurance branches does it cover?

The HIS covers seven branches: motor (Kfz), accident, legal protection, property, life, transport and liability. Substitutive private health insurance (private Krankenvollversicherung, PKV) is not one of them. Applications and declines in private health insurance are therefore not recorded in the HIS at all.

Does the HIS store health data?

No. The HIS does not store diagnoses or health data in any branch. What it stores is a coded pointer, an entry that flags that risk-relevant information exists at a named insurer, in a form from which the person and the underlying detail cannot be read off directly. An insurer that sees a pointer must go to the reporting insurer, with your consent, to learn more. It is a warning index, not a medical file.

How does private health insurance handle this instead?

Because private health insurance is outside the HIS, the industry runs its own procedure, the Versichertenumfrage, through the PKV association. It is not a standing database. It is triggered at the point of a formal application and, in practice, only where there is a concrete suspicion such as fraud. The more common way a prior decline becomes visible is simpler: a later application asks you to declare whether an earlier one was declined, surcharged or withdrawn, and you must answer truthfully under the duty of disclosure in Paragraph 19 VVG. This is exactly what an anonymous pre-inquiry (Risikovoranfrage) avoids creating.

What rights do you have?

You can request a self-disclosure (Selbstauskunft) about any entry concerning you, free of charge, from Besurance HIS GmbH, and have inaccurate data corrected or deleted. These are standard data-protection rights under the GDPR, overseen by the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI). If you are unsure whether anything is on record about you, requesting the self-disclosure answers it directly rather than leaving it to guesswork.