New German Government: Health Care should stay Offline
In other countries lots of money is spend on electronic health records and digitizing medicine because of the (imho well founded) believe, that in the long run this will enable massive cost savings and improvements in quality. Not so in Germany - here our new government just decided that the introduction of electronic health care records needs to be slowed down and needs to be reevaluated (because they are afraid that privacy cannot be guaranteed and because they want to save a few millions in the short run). Ah well, guess in 20 years Germany can then just buy a finished solution from some high tech country - after another 100,000 people have died from preventable drug side effects and drug interactions (only one of the things that could be tackled really well with electronic health records).
2 Comments:
Well... what's the solution of the privacy aspect? The german system doesnt solve that, so it's better to stop that card instead of having it with all the risks concerning privacy.
first: put privacy issues into a proper perspective. E.g. the theoretical risk of insurance companies discriminating based on health data has to be weighted against the very real problem of deaths through easily detectable drug interactions (here privacy comes at a very large cost). Second, realistically look at the current system - health data is already sold routinely.
Then, after we have done that we can just do our best to make the system secure (and it already has a very elaborate security model) and use very strict laws to go after those companies/people that misuse the data. With this we would have had a much better chance to keep data private than in the current system.
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