The Germans should be able to expect a “vertical start”, no more and no less, from their healthcare system.

Federal Minister Karl Lauterbach speaks.

The vision: Our hospitals are entering the digital age.

Nobody laughs.

At most inside.

Because everyone who hears this vision in Lauterbach's opening speech at the leading European digital trade fair DMEA in Berlin knows the history.

Digitization is still one of the darkest chapters in German medical history.

Estonia, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, England - the list of countries that have left Germany behind in data medicine could be continued.

It has been twenty years since Lauterbach and other health experts proposed the electronic patient record (EHR).

Today, says the minister,

he rubs his eyes because the use of patient data is still in its infancy.

Less than one percent of those with statutory health insurance use the ePA, which was introduced at the beginning of 2021.

Dismissal letters, findings and X-rays are still being sent and hoarded almost entirely in analogue form, while routine operations are being carried out around Germany using artificial intelligence.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.

  • Follow I follow

The report published in June 2021 by the German Council of Experts for the Evaluation of Developments in the Health Care System states: "The life and health of people in Germany could be better protected if the opportunities offered by digitization were used responsibly and in a scientifically sensible manner." has been mentioned more and more since then.

Yes, a year later something like a revolutionary spirit is stirring.

In the Berlin Forum of the Working Group of Scientific Medical Societies (AWMF), for example, or at the DMEA, in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and at the Congress of the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) - almost simultaneously and in unison it is now verbosely documented, the new one Will to change: get out of the dead end,

Yes to progress, but just don't collect too much patient data - this formula doesn't work, everyone is realizing that by now.

Only: how to protect patients from misuse and from the American "data octopuses", as the Advisory Council called the big data giants Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Palantir and Co., and yet the ambitious goals of tailor-made data medicine not from the lose eyes?

"No longer pretending data protection and more pragmatism," demanded DGIM President and CEO of the LMU Clinic in Munich, Markus Lerch.

According to medical consensus, Germany still interprets the European General Data Protection Regulation too restrictively.

Valuable patient data must be deleted after a certain period of time,

the data storage is greatly "minimised" and each use for different research purposes is registered again.

"Where is someone harmed by the data collection?" asked Lerch, when on the other hand the added value of the data for research and human health is becoming increasingly undeniable.

“We are approaching the Scandinavian countries”

Yes, the value of disease data in registers or after analyzes in biobanks is increasing on the way to high-performance medicine.

But: Even the basic infrastructure for this is still poor in the country.

According to “Digitalradar”, the average degree of digitization in German clinics is 33.25 – out of a maximum of 100 possible points.

Karl Broich, President of the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices, said at the Berlin forum: Not only the amount of data, "the data quality must also be right".

Instead, patient data has so far mostly been old and difficult to access.