Germany’s Digitalisation Strategy for Health and Care

In combination with the German Federal Government’s National Digitalisation Strategy, the Digitalisation Strategy for Health and Care plots a clear course of action. It sets out a vision of a resilient, future-proof, sustainable and digitally assisted health and care system, and provides guidelines on how to achieve it. The Strategy provides all stakeholders with a transparent guideline. It contains verifiable goals and objectives, will be evaluated regularly, and updated continuously. Digital transformation of health and care serves to enable people in Germany to lead healthy, good and long lives. In doing so, an eye is kept to the European dimension of cross-border healthcare provision. The aim is to achieve the best possible mix of digital and analogue components of people-centric healthcare:

-Stakeholders are closely interconnected and interact via beneficial digital technologies and applications. In a digital healthcare ecosystem, healthcare providers, health insurance funds, long-term care insurance funds and other cost carriers, as well as the industrial healthcare economy, work hand in hand, exchanging health information and data as part of the healthcare process. Digital connectivity is closely related with increasing institutional connectivity between the various stakeholders in health and care. It, thereby, enables partnership-based cooperation across healthcare sectors and professions.

-As a learning system, the health and care system will be developed involving active use of healthcare data, thereby enabling optimal use of digitalisation potential. In addition to providing the best possible treatment and medical aftercare, preventive health maintenance and preventing the need for long-term care are of vital importance.

-Patients can easily access and understand health-related information, enabling them to better avoid illness and its consequences and thus make informed decisions about treatment. ƒ Patients’ health and care data should be able to be used for health policy management and research purposes, thereby serving the further improvement of healthcare.

-Innovative, secure technologies can give rise to rapid, widespread benefits in the health and care context. Healthcare provision and administration processes, as well as their associated structures, will be continuously transformed in line with available digital solutions.

-The healthcare provision process should be seamlessly structured for patients and for healthcare and social welfare professions. The relevant data and information are available, thereby generating added value in healthcare provision.