The Strategy’s key content

The Strategy’s overarching goals and objectives are:

1. Consistent focus on people, patient sovereignty and enthusiasm
2. Improved quality of care
3. Greater cost-effectiveness and efficiency

To achieve these objectives and goals, three central action fields have been identified for the digital transformation of health and care:

Digitally assisted healthcare processes

Through wider use of digital resources, Provision and administration processes in health and long-term care are improved and redesigned. Against this backdrop, the aim of the Digitalisation Strategy is to establish needs-based, efficient processes which ensure optimal digital assistance and support.

With our progress in connecting healthcare providers throughout Germany to the telematics infrastructure (TI), the routine use of e-prescriptions and the introduction of the electronic patient record (ePA), vital contributions have been made in recent years towards reaching this aim. In future, novel procedures should allow integrating the possibilities of digitalisation into even more processes to consistently gear them towards quality, efficiency and the needs of those affected, and to anchor them in everyday healthcare. The guiding principle here is to prioritise digital processes where they have been demonstrated to deliver the same or higher performance (“digital before outpatient before inpatient”).

Generation and use of health data

Both in care provision and in health policy governance, data should help in enabling well-founded, informed decisions. The research community and the general public should also benefit from the availability of health data. Moreover, Germany’s health and long-term care system should be interfaced with the future European Health Data Space (EHDS) to enable quality healthcare provision and research across national borders.

For this to happen, we need data-based added value in healthcare and reliable mechanisms for the linkage and secondary use of quality-assured data from different sources. From the perspective of insurance members, health data need to be made easier to understand and interpret. Also, a binding implementation and enforcement of interoperability requirements is needed – for instance by specifying and establishing internationally recognised standards and terminologies.

Benefit-oriented technologies and applications

Innovative digital technologies and applications can help prevent diseases, treat them more effectively or even restore health. People in need of long-term care can be empowered to live independently as far as possible, and the burden on friends and family as well as caregivers is reduced.

The stability and security of the telematics infrastructure and its applications is a basic prerequisite in order to further advance the universal integration of digital applications such as ePA and e-prescription into everyday care. Without it, people-centred, high-quality and efficient digital care is scarcely possible.

In addition to highly reliable applications and the added value generated by their use, the key to acceptance of digital applications is a high level of digital health literacy along with target group-specific communication in all implementation steps – for example through targeted training of insured persons, relatives and healthcare staff.