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Munich (dpa) - Telemedicine in Germany is growing rapidly.

"Corona catapulted us five years forward in this area," says the managing director of Munich Teleclinic GmbH, Katharina Jünger.

Five years is a long time in your industry.

Jünger founded her company, which operates one of the largest platforms for telemedicine in Germany, six years ago.

The Teleclinic boss hopes for an additional boost from a legal reform with which Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) would like to further facilitate online treatments.

Physiotherapists and midwives should also be able to support patients via computers and smartphones.

The Central Institute for Statutory Health Insurance (ZI) also observed a sharp increase in video consultation hours after the outbreak of the corona pandemic - the institute counted around 1.7 million between March and September 2020. "In the comparison period of 2019, it was practically zero," says the ZI managing director Dominik von Stillfried.

However, he often considers the time and organizational effort that doctors have with video consultations to be a considerable obstacle.

"For the practices, online contacts are very inefficient compared to normal consultation hours."

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According to a survey by the digital industry association Bitkom, around 17 percent of practice doctors offer video consultation hours.

Another 40 percent can imagine such an offer.

"We see an extremely strong openness here," says Bitkom Managing Director Bernhard Rohleder.

One of the doctors who were open to video consultations very early on was the Munich family doctor Markus von Specht.

When he began to treat his patients remotely online six years ago, he was still an exotic figure in the medical profession.

The demand from patients was just enough to fill one video hour a week.

Now he has a daily online consultation.

“And it's always fully booked,” he says.

He commissioned the German subsidiary of the French company Doctolib as a technical service provider.

The Internet platform, which also focuses on making appointments, claims to be visited by more than four million users in Germany every month.

Doctolib wants to use the tailwind of the pandemic for further growth, as does the German subsidiary of the Swedish provider Kry.

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In early 2020, the Swedes announced that they had raised $ 140 million from investors for further expansion.

The medical director of Kry Germany, Monika Gratzke, says: "With the money we can implement technologies that lead to better patient care in the German healthcare system."

The managing director of the Munich telemedicine company Jameda, Florian Weiß, also sees great growth opportunities for his company.

The company, which has become known as a doctor rating portal, has meanwhile expanded its business with the digitization of medical treatment to include several modules.

Weiß says that it is not about the mechanization of medicine.

"The focus is on the relationship between doctor and patient."

In the medical profession, the initiatives to expand telemedicine are met with a mixed response.

The President of the German Medical Association, Klaus Reinhardt, is certain: "We will still be able to see interesting models."

But he adds: "You cannot treat stomach pain online."

Reinhardt sees with skepticism that large companies are becoming more and more involved in telemedicine.

Jameda was taken over by the media group Burda in 2015.

The DocMorris portal, which sells medicines online, also belongs to the group of companies.

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Medical President Reinhardt fears conflicting goals when doctors work with a company that has an economic interest in selling as many drugs as possible.

"I see it very critically," says Reinhardt.

The medical association is examining whether this construction can legally endure.

Teleclinic managing director Katharina Jünger is calm: "Of course we take care."

Not only from the top of the German Medical Association are reservations about the fact that ever larger alliances are being formed in online medicine.

The Munich family doctor von Specht sees a danger: "That financial interests take up the most space and that it is not about better patient care."

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210408-99-122702 / 2