The business community believes this is the right time to leverage the momentum from the crisis to strengthen digitalisation. In telemedicine, practice has already proven that it works. Everyone in the healthcare sector will benefit from this: Digital-health start-ups, producers of medical technology and pharmaceuticals, as well as professionals, hospitals, health insurance providers—and, most importantly, every individual patient.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, crucial measures had already been initiated according to DIHK analysis, but they couldn't be fully utilised for managing the crisis—like the electronic patient record (ePA). Its base functionality was supposed to be available from 2021, with further features like a digital vaccination record planned for 2022, enabling insured individuals to access their data via smartphones.

Value Creation and Jobs through Digitalisation

Consistent use of digitalisation can generate value creation and new jobs through innovations in Germany. Additionally, overall healthcare provision would improve: For instance, Artificial Intelligence (AI) could aid in the diagnosis of rare diseases.

Mass adoption of telemonitoring for chronic illnesses could enable quicker initiation of therapeutic measures. This supports economic personnel planning overall, ensuring healthier employees while minimising sick-related absences and making them shorter and rarer. At the same time, consistent utilisation of digitalisation helps optimise the use of scarce healthcare professionals and enhances quality provision, positively affecting the financial development in the healthcare sector and benefiting the entire economy.

Strengthening Health Research

The pandemic also highlighted the importance of efficient health research, such as for rapid vaccine development. Thus, improving health research further, including better data usage, becomes essential. Data is not only vital for digital business models but also crucial for pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. Currently, businesses often rely on health research data from other countries to train AI-powered products or improve existing ones.

DIHK suggests swiftly implementing the planned Health Data Utilisation Act while involving private research and addressing their needs. The new legal framework should clearly and uniformly regulate the submission and use of health data across the supply chain, considering the planned European Health Data Space. This is the only way to ensure cross-border access to data and unleash its full potential.

A glance abroad can also serve as orientation: In France, for example, a Health Data Hub is being established, providing access to research data for industrial research upon application.

Download

The DIHK position paper on healthcare digitalisation is available here:

"Synergising, advancing digitalisation, strengthening health" (PDF, 323 KB) (only available in German).