New digital health laws passed by German law makers

Doctors who create the e-health cards can claim compensation under the new law, which was passed by the German Bundestag last week.

In future, details of patients' medication plan will also be able to be stored on the e-health cards under the new regime. The measure is aimed at ensuring doctors treating patients have visibility of the drugs prescribed by other doctors to help avoid "dangerous" drug cocktails, the Bundestag said in a statement.

The new law is also designed to promote further "digitisation" in the health sector, with testing of a new patient data management system envisaged. Doctors will be initially incentivised to ensure that they input details of the decisions they take about patients into the new system, but face being punished financially in future for failure to do so.

The Bundestag said that data protection is a "top priority" under the new regime. The law requires access to data on the new system to be controlled and logged, and the medical data itself is to be encrypted.

Patients can select what data can be stored about them on the new system and determine which organisations can access it, it said. Patients can also "delete data at any time", the Bundestag said.

Expert in digital health Marc Holtorf of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that Germany is currently "no role model for a modern e-health society" and that it would remain to be seen whether the new legislation would change that. He said the new law was in part prompted by the results of a study last year which found shortcomings with e-health interoperability in Germany.

"In the EU Germany is, at best, in the midfield when it comes to the implementation of e-health solutions," Holtorf said. "Therefore, the German federal minister for health wants to foster the transformation towards a real e-health system."

"There are quite a few barriers, some are legal, such as data protection restraints and a lack of legal certainty, and some are technical, such as the lack of the interoperability between the three digit number of different e-health systems currently operated by physicians, hospitals, sick funds and the like in Germany," he said.

As well as facilitating better data sharing and links between different IT systems, the German government will also be hoping that the e-health reforms can help cut the cost of health care in the country, Holtorf said.

Federal health minister in Germany Hermann Gröhe said: "Digital networking can save lives and strengthens the patients". He said Germany's federal data protection commissioner and office for IT security had developed a system that provides for the protection of "highly sensitive" patient data.