National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Dentists
Berlin (ots)
How is digitization in healthcare going? Health Minister Karl Lauterbach presented his plans for the future of IT applications in the system on March 9 in Berlin before the federal press conference. According to the minister, two laws planned for the next few weeks – the digital law and the health data usage law – are intended to promote further digitization “as the key to the future viability” of the healthcare system. The electronic patient record (ePA) plays the role of the key application in order to be able to generate data for science, research and industry. Telemedicine should also benefit from the ePA, which the minister wants to be expanded to include pharmacies and health kiosks. Lauterbach sees data protection issues as solvable. And the role of gematik should also change. As a future digital health agency, it should soon be 100 percent owned by the federal government.
The chairman of the board of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Dentists, dr Wolfgang Esseron the Minister of Health‘s plans: “A digitization strategy that specifically improves patient care is very welcome. In this respect, we are disappointed by the Minister’s nebulous announcements. This applies in particular to the electronic patient file, which the Minister describes as a key application, for the development of which the gematik is responsible Unfortunately, as the minister also stated in his press conference, 20 years have passed without an ePA that can be used by patients and service providers To be able to provide data for research and industry.
Merely referring to the service providers as data feeders is far from any sensible solution to the problem. If Minister Lauterbach wants to improve the high level of care for patients in Germany with the goals he has set out and at the pace he wants, he must ensure that gematik finalizes a universally agreed data concept for the EHR as quickly as possible. Because this is the prerequisite for the development of the software programs that are absolutely necessary for the interoperability of IT systems, without which neither a largely automated data filling nor data extraction of the ePA is possible.
The Federal Association of Statutory Health Insurance Dentists emphatically rejects the ministerial lowering of data protection for our patients in order to enable a simplified, broad use of the data. This approach is the opposite of the minister’s reaffirmed maxim that the patient is the master of his data.
Of course, as the majority shareholder of gematik, the federal government is free to decide on the composition of the shareholders. With a view to the financing of the future digital agency by the federal government instead of the insured persons’ money, the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Dentists welcomes this step, especially since it also clearly addresses the responsibility for the centrally desired digitization measures in the healthcare system. The Minister should once again critically examine the extent to which the waiver of the expertise of service providers increases the acceptance and implementation of future measures.”
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Original content from: National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Dentists, transmitted by news aktuell