During a discussion on patient files at the virtual medical fair Medica, Thomas Ballast, deputy chairman of the Techniker Krankenkasse, spoke of an “unfortunate controversy” with the federal data protection officer Ulrich Kelber.

Data sovereignty According to Kelber, the must be by January 1st 2021 incoming electronic patient files (ePA 1.1) of the statutory health insurance have a function to hide certain treatment data and findings in the file before a doctor’s visit. If this “fine-grained” file inspection or blocking does not work, the insured does not have full data sovereignty over his medical data. Kelber had already sent an “open warning” to the health insurance companies.

The possibility of hiding data comes according to the plans of the Gematik project company with the ePA 2.0, which, however, should only be offered from 2022. In the discussion at the virtual Medica, Gematik Managing Director Markus Leyk Dieken, as a doctor, pointed out a related aspect of hiding the data: “Doctors who look at findings on the #ePA that are none of their business are endangering their license to practice medicine.”

Access log He referred to the extensive log functions of the patient record, which record who accessed which data and findings of an insured person and when Has. In this reading, the access log would provide the insured with a kind of data protection, because doctors need to know that their handling of the file can be checked. It is not known whether this can convince the Federal Data Protection Commissioner to give up his reservations about the introduction of patient files.

Markus Leyk Dieken was convinced that all 105 German statutory health insurance companies can offer their 44 millions of insured persons a free patient record and the approximately 300 Software systems with which doctors, dentists, pharmacies and hospitals can read the data from the EPR.

Thomas Ballast referred to the positive experiences that his cash register had with the file TK-Safe did. The system developed by IBM is offered by the cash register as a “health record” and, according to Ballast, from 300. 000 insured. “Hundreds” are added every day. With the general introduction of the electronic patient file, Ballast sees healthy competition coming among the statutory health insurance companies, “similar to the apps in the banking sector”.

( kbe)