E-Health: More efficiency through decision support systems

22.10.2009 12:53

Make the right choice with the help of decision support systems

Quality and efficiency play a central role in patient care. In Germany, a doctor has an average of 7.6 minutes to make the right decision (for comparison: in Switzerland it is 15.6 minutes) - often too little to recognize complex issues and react to them in a differentiated manner.

One of the consequences: Of the 470 million prescriptions issued per year in Germany, 2.82 million prescriptions have potential for danger. The current political discussion is that 846,000 prescriptions lead to necessary hospital treatment. There are up to 16,000 deaths every year due to incorrect prescriptions and over 500 million euros in unnecessary costs.

The reason for this is often too little information about the patient's medical history. With decision support systems, CompuGROUP provides relevant medical information based on the health data of the respective patient at the right time and in the right place. With the use of intelligent software, the eHealth provider wants to achieve an important goal: increasing the efficiency of the healthcare system by 15 percent, i.e. a real increase in quality while simultaneously making significant cost savings.

“Decision Support is the new third pillar in the healthcare system and the key success factor in supporting service providers,” explains Chief Medical Officer Prof. Dr. med. Stefan F. Winter from CompuGROUP. “Medical knowledge is constantly growing, but it also confronts doctors with a real flood of information. This is exactly where Decision Support comes in: it provides doctors with the right choice from the huge range of medical findings. And all of this in the right place and at the right time, namely in the doctor's information system, which 81 percent of all doctors use intensively for more than 336 minutes per day. We call that valuable support that benefits both doctor and patient.”