Health
Operation catch-up for e-prescription and e-medical record
In the healthcare sector, Germany is to become more digital. photo
© Annegret Hilse/Reuters/Pool/dpa
Book trips, transfer money: In everyday life, a lot is done digitally. In the healthcare sector, however, Germany is still a “developing country”. The Minister of Health is now speeding up two flagship projects.
Electronic prescriptions and digital health records should become part of everyday life for millions of patients. This is what the Minister of Health is aiming for Karl Lauterbach (SPD), which the Federal Cabinet initiated. After years of delays and technical problems, digitization in the health care system should get going.
E-prescriptions should be available in all practices by early 2024. As a core project, e-patient files should come for everyone at the beginning of 2025 – unless you reject it. The use of combined health data for research is also to be made easier and significantly promoted.
Lauterbach expects great popularity for electronic patient files. He expects more than 80 percent who want to use the e-file, said the SPD politician in Berlin. Even if patients do not want to look at them themselves via an app on their smartphone, the full benefit would be there if doctors could have a bundled view of the stored data. Anyone who rejects the e-patient file completely, of course, has poorer care, because the findings cannot then flow into the treatment process in their entirety and at a faster pace.
Lauterbach said: “We are starting a race to catch up both in everyday care and in research.” Patients should be confident that their health data is being used securely wherever they are to provide them with better care. The minister had made it clear several times that there was a lot of catching up to do: Unfortunately, Germany was “a developing country” when it came to digitizing the healthcare system. FDP politician Christine Aschenberg-Dugnus explained that digitization is also an answer to challenges such as exploding costs, a shortage of skilled workers and supply in rural areas.
Lauterbach particularly wants to speed up applications with practical benefits for patients. Two laws are now coming to further deliberations in the Bundestag. An overview:
E-prescription across the board
For some time now, e-prescriptions have also been able to be redeemed using a special app or a printed QR code instead of the usual pink slip of paper. But a larger-scale breakthrough was delayed several times, also due to technical problems. Another, simpler method of redemption should now bring more impetus: Since July 1, it has been possible in pharmacies to insert the health insurance card into a reader. From January 1, 2024, it will be mandatory for doctors to issue prescriptions electronically. The practices should gradually change over to this. And actually, they were already obliged to have an e-prescription from the beginning of 2022.
In practice, however, the prerequisites for this have not yet been created everywhere. This includes a connection device to the healthcare information superhighway. The e-prescriptions are stored on a central server and when the cash register card is inserted, the pharmacy is authorized to retrieve them from there. “The only fully digital way for e-prescriptions is redemption via an app,” said the head of Techniker Krankenkasse, Jens Baas. With the law, the e-prescription app can also be integrated into the cash register apps in the future.
E-medical record for everyone
E-files have already been introduced as a selectable offer in 2021. They are intended to be a personal data store and, in principle, to accompany patients throughout their lives with all doctors. The bundled data should also avoid drug interactions and unnecessary multiple examinations. The only problem is that so far only about one percent of the 74 million people with statutory health insurance have opted for an e-file. The federal government’s declared acceleration target is to reach 80 percent by 2025.
To this end, the coalition wants to switch to the “opt-out” principle: According to the draft law, the health insurance companies should provide broad information and then automatically set up an e-file for all those with statutory health insurance by January 15, 2025 – unless you actively object. The e-file should then be retrievable with certain identification rules via a cash register app. You should be able to determine what doctors put in the file and who can access what. First, a drug overview should be usable, followed by laboratory results, among other things. You can take the data with you when you change cash registers.
Easier data research
Another goal is to advance research using health data. To this end, Lauterbach wants to make it possible by law to link data from various sources – for example from cancer registries and health insurance companies – to a central access point. The data should be encrypted (pseudonymized). An opt-out model is planned for data stored in e-files: you should initially have a setting for “data donations” for research purposes, but you can object to this.
Lauterbach sees great potential in data evaluations that other countries could use to gain quick insights into the corona pandemic. In general, artificial intelligence could then be used to better identify tumors in the early stages, for example, by comparing them with similar cases.