Hospital.Help

Berlin Today the government commission for modern and needs-based hospital care presented a statement on reducing bureaucracy in hospitals. Among other things, it is recommended to expand the electronic patient file (ePA) into a central data source for the automated generation and transmission of all mandatory reports, to reduce parallel structural audits to one audit and to further standardize the exchange of data.

The commission’s report addresses the well-known problem of bureaucracy, said Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD). The suggestions will be incorporated into the completed law on de-bureaucratization in the healthcare system. He hopes that this long overdue law can be implemented immediately in the next legislative period. We are also checking, as is the case in many areas, what can still be regulated by legal regulation.

Tom Bschor, head of the government hospital commission, emphasized that the proposals made are expected to have a major relief effect. The recommendations are necessarily small-scale because there is no one big idea that can reduce bureaucracy.

The commission recommends that the ePA be further developed with the aim of an automated and nationwide uniform transmission of required hospital reports. The point here is that the patient’s voluntary decision for or against using the ePA can only be an intermediate step and the aim must be to make it binding for all hospital treatments.

In the future, data on findings and treatments should be stored on a central server while ensuring a high level of data protection and access should be made possible via a user-friendly portal.

In addition, the Commission is in favor of the self-administration and medical service committees regularly checking the requirements for reporting and documentation obligations to see if they make sense. Hospitals and hospital associations should also examine self-imposed reporting obligations in a structured process and reduce unnecessary requirements.

According to the statement, structural audits that are currently running in parallel should be combined in the medium term into a uniform audit process for the future performance groups. Furthermore, it is advocated to standardize the requirements for information to be provided by hospitals as part of budget negotiations between clinics and health insurance companies. The same applies to staffing requirements.

The commission also considers it useful to expand the skills of nurses and other non-medical professional groups, for example in prescribing medical supplies and aids and patient transport. This could relieve the burden on doctors.

A nationwide uniform digital standard for data exchange and the switch from individual case to structural examinations are intended to provide further relief. And: Negotiations about the reimbursement of new examination and treatment methods that are not yet covered by the flat rate per case should in future no longer be carried out individually by the individual hospitals, but by the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA), within three months of the application being submitted , take place.

DKG sees the next government as having a duty

The CEO of the German Hospital Association (DKG), Gerald Ga, rated the proposals as too late, too vague and too unambitious. Concrete steps to relieve the burden are urgently needed.

The fact that doctors and nurses have to spend almost three hours of their working day on paperwork that is often unnecessary for medical and nursing purposes is unacceptable. But instead of taking concrete action and creating the political framework, the minister and the commission are shifting responsibility to the hospitals, says Ga.

What remains is the realization that the next government and a new health minister must put the bureaucracy issue at the top of the agenda. © aha/aerzteblatt.de