Hospital.Help

Berlin – Several federal states have drawn up a number of proposals for reducing bureaucracy in the health care system and submitted them to the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG).

Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) had announced that he would present a law to reduce bureaucracy this autumn. The proposals submitted by the states range from the hospital sector to quality assurance and the use of digitalization to reduce bureaucracy.

As from the paper which the German Medical Journal For example, the Hospital Transparency Act is repeatedly targeted. Baden-Württemberg states that minute-by-minute recording of doctors’ working hours is “out of proportion to the benefit” of the data delivery.

Hospitals generally do not have the relevant information and it cannot be obtained from existing IT systems. This means that hospitals incur significant additional costs in fulfilling their obligation to provide data.

Bavaria and Saxony have a similar view. Bavaria is in favour of completely removing this obligation in the further legislative process for the Hospital Care Improvement Act (KHVVG).

The proposal from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is to simplify and streamline the application process for funding – for example from the Hospital Structure Fund – as much as possible. Data delivery deadlines should also be fundamentally harmonized, delivery rhythms coordinated, redundant data deliveries avoided and the corresponding processes digitized.

Purify quality assurance

A proposal from Lower Saxony deals with optimization options for external quality assurance – which affects both hospitals and service providers approved for statutory health insurance.

According to the assessment from Lower Saxony, there is still a lack of reliable evidence as to whether, how and to what extent cross-sector quality assurance actually contributes to improving care and whether blatant quality deficits can be identified from the large amount of data. Quality assurance procedures that demonstrably generate no or no additional benefit must be completely abolished, according to the demand.

In addition, it is proposed that, for quality assurance procedures with proven benefits, annual data collection should be paused and replaced by the introduction of suitable intervals for data collection and submission – ideally using an intelligent IT solution.

The Lower Saxony recommendation sees further potential for relief in a revision and simplification of the staffing levels of the Psychiatry and Psychosomatics Guideline (PPP-RL) of the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA).

Regarding digitization, Lower Saxony says that a non-discriminatory integration of all components and services must be ensured – with the aim of reducing bureaucracy through mandatory standards in hospital information systems, practice management systems, quality assurance and registers. In addition, digital automation is needed for data exchange without repeated manual input.

Digital solutions should always and from the very first implementation make work noticeably easier for users, who should not take on the role of beta users of new software and should not be subject to sanctions.

Schleswig-Holstein is calling for the complete digitization of the electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU) to be made possible for patients as well. In addition, inquiries from health insurance companies and other bodies should be optimized.

Since digital transmission has not yet been possible and the questionnaires of the health insurance companies differ both from each other and from those of the Medical Service (MD), the information has had to be collected in each individual case, which is time-consuming, and entered manually into the various forms.

In addition, a de minimis threshold should be defined for enquiries from health insurance companies in order to ensure that the relationship between the effort required to answer them and the benefit of the enquiry for ensuring the economic efficiency of the regulation is reasonable, according to another proposal from Schleswig-Holstein. © aha/bee/aerzteblatt.de