A portal that shows how good the quality of treatment is for each hospital could go online next year. The Federal Cabinet approved a legislative proposal from Health Minister Lauterbach. But there is criticism.
Patients will soon be able to find out more about the services and quality of treatment provided by hospitals in Germany in a government online directory. This is what Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s legal plans, which the Federal Cabinet has initiated, provide for this.
The “transparency directory” is intended to provide information in an understandable, interactive form about which operations are offered at which clinic. The start is targeted for April 2024. The law is intended to supplement a planned major hospital reform with new financing regulations, the basic principles of which were agreed upon by the majority of the federal and state governments.
Number of doctors and complications
Specifically, patients should be able to use the portal to see which hospital in their area offers which services and how it performs in terms of quality, the ministry explained. It should also be possible to see how many nursing staff and specialists there are or how frequently complications occur.
To this end, clinics will have to report additional data in the future – including on nurses and doctors. The information will then be combined with existing other data via two commissioned institutes and prepared for publication.
Criticism from Bavaria
But some federal states complain that the bureaucratic effort could then become too great, especially for small clinics. The Bavarian Health Minister Klaus Holetschek is one of the critics. More transparency is good, he said, “but this law will create more bureaucracy, will cause more discord, and will be at the expense of smaller houses that actually don’t deserve it.”
Holetschek fears that small hospitals in particular will suffer under the law because they could receive a worse rating. The chairman of the Conference of Health Ministers, Manfred Lucha, is also critical of the draft law. He believes that the federal government is encroaching too much on the responsibility of the states.
With information from Birthe Sönnichsen, ARD capital studio