Independent patient advice starts cooperation with the national health portal Gesund.bund

01.12.2021 14:15

From December 1st, the Independent Patient Advice Germany (UPD) will provide various content for the national health portal Gesund.bund.de. The UPD is now one of a number of cooperation partners, such as the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the Federal Center for Health Education (BZgA) and the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG). The UPD wants to support the portal, especially in the area of health law, and thus contribute to greater health literacy among the German population.

"The portal healthy.bund.de as a central contact point for reliable and generally understandable information on health topics is a good and sensible project. Current studies on the topic of health literacy as well as the corona pandemic and the social debates about vaccinations have shown that health literacy in the German population needs to be significantly strengthened. This requires constructive and targeted cooperation between all relevant players in the healthcare system. As UPD, we also advise those seeking advice with the aim of informing them clearly about their rights and entitlements as patients and strengthening their general health literacy. “We would like to enable those seeking advice to find their way around the German healthcare system better and to be able to make informed, independent decisions about their health,” says UPD managing director Thorben Krumwiede.

UPD provides information about patient rights healthy.bund.de ready

In particular, the UPD will expand its expertise in the area of patient rights: “It starts with a detailed information text on the topic of objections to notifications from health insurance companies. This is a common topic in our advice with questions about deadlines, forms and how to deal with interim decisions. With our information texts on topics like this, we as UPD want to present complex topics in a generally understandable way and thus make it easier for laypeople to navigate through some of the 'mazes' and barriers in the German healthcare system," says Marcel Weigand, Head of Cooperation and Transformation at the UPD.