A necessary activity towards moving healthcare services out of the physical premises of hospitals and into patients’ daily lives is to supply citizens with various health services via the Internet, i.e. public eHealth services. However, developing public eHealth services for a large number of heterogeneous end-users is a complex task. This case study investigated the development process of a novel eHealth service that provides patient access to electronic health records, which was developed and recently deployed within the scope of an EU project.A conventional customer-vendor process was applied that resulted in a high degree of uncertainty regarding end-user needs of this novel service. The development team tried to compensate for this weakness by using agile methods. When developing public eHealth services for citizens, it is imperative to involve potential users, to evaluate the citizens’ needs as a function of benefit, usability and security, and to handle those concepts responsibly throughout the process.