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The long-awaited law for the protection of electronic patient data in the telematics infrastructure - Patient Data Protection Act for short or even shorter PDSG - is quite something. This means that “digitization should finally arrive in patients’ everyday lives,” as Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn explained at the second and third (and therefore final) consultation in the Bundestag. After decades of debate, this means that digital offers such as e-prescriptions and electronic patient files (including vaccination certificates, maternity records, U-booklets for children and dental bonus books) can be used, and specialist referrals can also be transmitted digitally. The law, which is expected to come into force in the fall and does not require approval by the Federal Council, regulates much more: On the one hand, every insured person will in future be able to voluntarily make their health data available to medical research. And secondly, it was made clear almost in passing that “information from health insurance companies about life-saving care is not advertising,” as the Munich family doctor and CDU/CSU member of the Bundestag Stephan Nikolaus Pilsinger emphasized in his speech, which has so far been the application of the law against unfair treatment Competition (UWG) failed (see MVF 03/20).
28.07.2020
Prof. Dr. med. Reinhard Busse, Professor of Healthcare Management at the Faculty of Economics and Management at the Technical University of Berlin, has been one of the most prominent German healthcare researchers for years, even more so when it comes to the international context. When he took over the congress presidency of the 19th DKVF last year, which takes place at the end of September this year, there was still no trace of Covid-19 on the horizon.
28.07.2020
With an increase of 5.7% to 46.7 billion euros in the overall market, the trend towards higher sales of statutory health insurance (GKV) for medicines continues more strongly than in previous years. This is one of the central results of the GKV drug market report published annually since 1985 by the AOK Scientific Institute (WIdO).
28.07.2020
A decade ago, on July 1, 2010, care began in Baden-Württemberg in the first AOK specialist contract for the field of cardiology. There are now over 2,800 specialists and psychotherapists from 12 specialist areas taking part in a total of seven contracts. Since 2013, AOK Baden-Württemberg has also been offering its specialist doctor program together with Bosch BKK. Together with the contract for family doctor-centered care (HZV), the selective contracts embody a unique, structured full care outside the KV system, AOK Baden-Württemberg is convinced. Modern working conditions without budgeting for medical fees and more consultation time would enable doctors to provide comprehensive and demonstrably better care for the insured. Scientific evaluations have also shown that patients with chronic heart failure or coronary heart disease actually live longer than with standard care.
28.07.2020
Since the first infections with the novel coronavirus appeared in China at the end of December, it has spread almost worldwide within just a few weeks. Like almost all industries in Germany, the healthcare market is also affected by the significant effects of the corona pandemic. Media attention, recommendations from scientific institutions, political orders and the spread of false information significantly influence the ups and downs in the market and are presented in excerpts in the following article.
25.05.2020
On May 6, 2020, the federal-state conference to contain the Covid-19 pandemic decided “that in districts or independent cities with a cumulative total of more than 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants within the last 7 days, a consistent restriction concept should be implemented immediately, including the “The relevant state authorities must be implemented”. Against this background, the Central Institute for Statutory Health Insurance (Zi) has developed country-specific key figures to control the course of the pandemic.
25.05.2020
On behalf of the Interdisciplinary Center for Health Literacy Research at Bielefeld University and the Department of Public Health and Education at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy conducted an online representative cross-section of the German population between March 31 and April 7, 2020 1,000 people aged 16 and over surveyed online. The focus is on the health literacy of the population, which involves assessing how well citizens are able to find and understand information about the coronavirus pandemic, make assessments on this basis and adapt their own behavior accordingly. The study paints an overall positive picture: The vast majority of the population feels well or even very well informed about the coronavirus, across gender differences, age groups and educational levels. Only ten percent of those surveyed said that they felt less well informed or not well informed at all. This result is probably due to the decisions of the political actors and the measures of the official institutions, which are generally perceived as understandable and useful.
25.05.2020
Are health insurance companies, whether statutory or private, allowed to actively contact their insured persons? The answer is simple: you can! However, since the health insurance data of insured persons, which form the basis of any communication of this type, is social data, which as such is particularly protected and is also subject to social secrecy, the reason for this contact is specific. However, there are some important purposes for which personal data may be collected and stored - such as contractual solutions (family doctor, selective contracts) and disease management programs (DMP). The data that can be used here does not include medical data. A very broad question now is whether high-risk patients can be identified via billing data and then addressed? This refers to Covid-19 high-risk patients, which the WIdO has already detected down to the regional level in a current monitor (see p. 18 ff.). Now one step that was previously not legally permissible is missing: de-anonymization!
25.05.2020
Overview of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe, presented by mortality rate (as of April 27, 2020). However, since the mortality rate is primarily determined by regional testing habits/quantities, the numbers should be interpreted with caution; Only a complete count of the number of unreported cases would provide clarity here. However, it can be assumed that the special path that Sweden was willing to take must be questioned; likewise the health care situation in some other European countries, which – at least as far as the mortality rate, which should be assessed with caution – perform much worse. The task of health services research would now be to find out why this is in detail: about access and availability (here especially medical specialists, hospital beds, intensive care beds and ventilators, etc.) of care, the quality of the same, hospitalization rate, etc. In Germany this is likely to be the case Mortality, as in many other European countries shown here, is around a tenth if the number of unreported cases is taken into account. But no one yet knows the population to which the lethality is based. The exception is Austria.
25.05.2020
The current Covid-19 pandemic also means that research-based pharmaceutical companies are once again among the hopefuls: medicines, vaccines and diagnostics should be developed, tested and made available in large numbers as quickly as possible. The focus is also on Roche, which is not only a pharmaceutical company but also a diagnostics company and has quickly developed a test that can detect the acute SARS-CoV-2 infection using RT-PCR. “Monitor Health Services Research” spoke about this with PD Dr. Claus Lattrich, Head of Personalized Medicine at Roche Pharma AG.