München – 27.02.2023
Dr. Gertrud Demmler, board member of the SBK Siemens company health insurance fund, at the first meeting of the new expert council on health and care
Tomorrow the new members of the Advisory Council (SVR) Health and Care will meet for their first joint meeting. I congratulate you on your appointment and wish you every success. The major challenges in the healthcare sector require the diverse expertise of the members and the courage to identify real drivers of change. Demographic funding gaps, skills shortages and new health burdens from climate change reveal mutually reinforcing problem areas that require a systemic perspective. From the point of view of the insured community of statutory health insurance, I see three central premises for the success of the necessary major reforms:
1 #Humancentricity: Focus on people:
Health care people must be at the center of all reforms. On the one hand, there are the insured, the patients. On the other hand, it is important to make jobs attractive for medical professions, nursing staff and many other healthcare professionals. Because they are the “human factor” without which human care is not possible. Dialogue, surveys and feedback processes help to never lose sight of people and their needs.
2 #Usercentricity: Exchange and networking thanks to user-centric digitization:
When it comes to digitization, the focus should be on benefits and practicability for those who use the offers. It is crucial to integrate users into the development process right from the start – both those who are insured and those who provide services. Then digital solutions have the potential to initiate many urgently needed improvements and create space for the valuable “human resource”.
3 #Qualitycentricity: Focus on quality instead of quantity:
In the healthcare system, the principle still applies: using a lot of resources means a lot of money. We’re setting the wrong incentives. In order to counteract this development, the quality of the results of therapies and treatments should be given much greater importance. The prerequisite for this is that we must measure quality for the benefit of the insured and make it transparent. For this we need institutionalized feedback processes and standardized quality criteria.
The SBK Siemens company health insurance company is the largest company health insurance company in Germany and is one of the 20 largest statutory health insurance companies. As an open, nationwide health insurance company, it insures more than a million people and looks after over 100,000 corporate customers in Germany – with more than 1,800 employees in 86 branches.
For more than 100 years, SBK has been personally and committed to the interests of the insured. It positions itself as a pioneer for real quality competition in statutory health insurance. From SBK’s point of view, the prerequisite for this is more transparency for the insured – about relevant financial key figures, but also about the willingness to perform, advice and service quality of health insurance companies. In the interests of the customer, SBK also combines the best of the personal and digital world and actively promotes digitization in the healthcare sector.