Berlin Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD) wants to make the electronic patient file more easily accessible for the prevention of diseases and for research. “The electronic patient record must be improved,” said Lauterbach on his trip to Israel in Tel Aviv. “We learn here from the health organizations.”
Important functions are not possible with the file as it is currently created. This involves, for example, filtering out high-risk patients – who could be at risk of heart attacks or strokes – from the data using artificial intelligence and informing them about the doctor.
This is possible in Israel, but there are technical hurdles in Germany. As an example, Lauterbach named the end-to-end encryption of the information stored in the electronic patient file.
“This means that we cannot use the data for this,” Lauterbach said on his trip to Israel, which ended on Tuesday. Encryption is particularly important for data protection officers and health insurance companies.
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The statutory health insurers have had to offer their insured persons the electronic patient file since 2021. The functions are currently still very limited, but in the future data such as X-ray images and medication plans will be stored in it.
Lauterbach wants a quick decision
From 2023, insured persons should be able to release patient data for research purposes. Lauterbach’s ministry is currently working on a so-called opt-out procedure. Insured persons must specifically object if they do not want to receive the electronic file.
“We need the system where you can use patient data to improve care, but also to do research,” said Lauterbach in Israel. So far, however, it is still unclear exactly what the procedure should look like.
In order for meaningful research and precautionary models to be possible at all using artificial intelligence, the pool of data must be as large and complete as possible. To do this, however, it would be necessary to oblige doctors and other service providers to file their patients’ data in the file – and not to leave this decision to the users.
However, this raises data protection issues. “These must be clarified as soon as possible,” explained Andreas Strausfeld, Managing Director of the IT company Bitmarck, whose electronic patient file is used by more than 80 health insurance companies.
The opt-out procedure must be regulated by law. The Federal Ministry of Health is in talks with the Federal Data Protection Commissioner, the health insurance companies and the semi-public company Gematik. Last week, the ministry officially launched a strategy process for digitization, which also includes the electronic patient record.
Lauterbach is apparently ready for major conversions. Patient files in Germany had been neglected for twenty years, Lauterbach said in Tel Aviv in an interview with Israeli health insurance representatives. A lot has happened in recent years, but that’s not enough.
“Some decisions weren’t good decisions because they were 100% safety decisions,” Lauterbach said. “We may even have to consider reversing the progress.” That is why important decisions lie ahead of him, “which have to be made very quickly”.
More: Lauterbach in the promised Corona land – What Germany can learn from Israel in the pandemic