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Health: Lauterbach wants to accelerate e-patient records and e-prescriptions

Health: Lauterbach wants to accelerate e-patient records and e-prescriptions

Booking trips, transferring money, shopping: millions of people have long been doing a lot of digital things in their everyday lives. Practices and clinics are lagging behind. Will politics now find a decisive boost for this?

Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach wants to significantly accelerate the sluggish spread of digital applications for patients. “Germany’s healthcare system is decades behind in digitization. We can no longer take responsibility for that,” said the SPD politician on Thursday. Therefore, “a new start” should come in order to open up electronic patient files for everyone, to make e-prescriptions suitable for everyday use and to facilitate research based on health data. Using the advantages of digitization makes the treatments better.

A legislative package is planned. Among other things, digital files are to be set up for all those with statutory health insurance by the end of 2024 – unless this is actively rejected. Findings, X-ray images and drug lists can be stored in it. E-files were introduced as a voluntary service in 2021, but only a fraction of the 74 million insured use them. The declared goal by 2025 is for 80 percent of those with statutory insurance to have e-files.

In addition, e-prescriptions should be easier to use after a hitherto sluggish introduction and become a binding standard at the beginning of 2024. More data evaluations for research are also to be regulated by law. Among other things, a central office is to be set up for this purpose, which should enable access to pseudonymised data from various sources such as registers and health insurance data.

Source: Stern

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