When it comes to the digitization of the healthcare system, Germany is at best mediocre within the EU.

Not only the northern European member states Denmark, Sweden and Finland as well as the digital pioneer Estonia, but also Austria and Spain have left Germany behind.

In Denmark, for example, all patient data from diagnosis to treatment, operations, medication plans and laboratory values ​​to vaccination status are now stored centrally.

Hospitals, dental practices, laboratories, pharmacies or patients can access it in real time.

All you need is a cell phone.

This avoids duplicate examinations, makes processes more efficient and avoids medication errors.

Henrik Kafsack

Business correspondent in Brussels.

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The European Commission now wants to make this the standard throughout the European Union and make latecomers like Germany responsible.

By 2025, all insured persons in the EU should be able to easily access electronic prescriptions, laboratory results, X-rays, discharge reports and vaccination certificates via smartphone or the Internet.

They should be able to make this data accessible to third parties, i.e. doctors or pharmacists, across borders.

In medical emergencies, doctors should also be able to access this data without permission.

This emerges from a draft EU law for a European health data room.

The draft is available to the FAZ.

The law is to be officially presented at the beginning of May, so it can still change before then.

Health data for research

This means that Germany has a lot of work to do.

There are now electronic health cards and electronic patient records in this country.

So far this is more theory than practice.

Contrary to what was originally planned, the e-prescription, on the other hand, has not yet progressed beyond the test phase, which is now at least nationwide.

Nevertheless, the Commission's prospects of enforcing the law on the European health data space are good, precisely because many member states have made significant progress in the digitization of the healthcare system.

The European Parliament has already signaled its agreement in principle.

Both must agree to the law for it to go into effect.

The proposed law also has another thrust.

The Commission wants to facilitate the use of health data for research.

This also targets genome data, data from clinical trials as well as social and lifestyle data that can have an impact on health.

The data should only be made available on request in an anonymous form, which makes it impossible to identify a patient even indirectly.

However, exceptions should be possible in justified cases.

The sale of the data to third parties is prohibited, as is their use for commercial advertising or decisions about whether individual patients or patient groups have access to insurance or bonus programs from insurance companies.

Last but not least, the Commission wants to use the data to promote the development of artificial intelligence in the EU, i.e. to test, train and evaluate AI algorithms in healthcare.

The legislative proposal is thus part of a series of other proposals from the past few months, with which the Commission wants to make the European "data treasure" usable for the European AI industry.

The potential of self-learning programs in the health sector is great.

They can be used to detect diseases at an early stage or to improve treatment processes and thus reduce costs.

The prerequisite for this, however, is that the manufacturers can access a data set that is as large as possible and at the same time tailored to the patients in order to be able to train the programs.