Dig­i­ti­za­tion: An oppor­tu­ni­ty for the health­care industry 

The plan is for patients to be able to use the dig­i­tal ser­vices across the board as soon as pos­si­ble. Phar­ma­cies (by the end of Sep­tem­ber 2020) and hos­pi­tals (by Jan­u­ary 1, 2021) are there­fore required to con­nect to the telem­at­ics infra­struc­ture (TI). Mid­wives and phys­io­ther­a­pists, as well as nurs­ing and reha­bil­i­ta­tion facil­i­ties, can vol­un­tar­i­ly con­nect to the TI free of charge. Physi­cians who still do not want to con­nect will have to accept an increased fee deduc­tion from March 1, 2020.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Health in Bochum sur­veyed for this pur­pose. The respon­dents saw pos­i­tive effects of dig­i­ti­za­tion pri­mar­i­ly in time sav­ings, stan­dard­iza­tion of ther­a­py process­es, inter­pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and sim­pli­fied doc­u­men­ta­tion. Rhön-Klinikum AG, one of Ger­many’s largest health­care providers, also sees dig­i­ti­za­tion as the key to gen­er­at­ing greater effi­cien­cy in patient care as well as in inter­nal work­flows: “Dig­i­tal net­work­ing with intel­li­gent IT solu­tions and inno­v­a­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems opens up new avenues in healthcare.”

How­ev­er, the new direc­tions can be tak­en not only in areas such as doc­u­men­ta­tion, billing and sched­ul­ing. That’s because dig­i­ti­za­tion is also on the rise in med­ical tech­nol­o­gy. From walk­ing sticks with inte­grat­ed GPS sen­sors and emer­gency call func­tions to robot-assist­ed ther­a­py units and vir­tu­al real­i­ty appli­ca­tions, a wide vari­ety of help­ful inno­va­tions can be found on the mar­ket. Peo­ple with chron­ic ill­ness­es can also ben­e­fit from dig­i­ti­za­tion. For peo­ple with dia­betes, for exam­ple, it is already pos­si­ble to keep an all-around eye on and man­age their con­di­tion via an app.

Espe­cial­ly in the field of phys­io­ther­a­py and reha­bil­i­ta­tion, there is an increas­ing focus on dig­i­tal progress in equip­ment devel­op­ment. The new ther­a­py and train­ing devices have inter­faces to eval­u­ate and doc­u­ment train­ing data and make it quick­ly acces­si­ble. One exam­ple is the intel­li­gent Pix­for­mance Sta­tion, which uses pre­cise analy­ses to track patients’ move­ments and eval­u­ates them in a mat­ter of sec­onds so that cor­rec­tive instruc­tions and feed­back on the respec­tive exer­cise exe­cu­tion can be pro­vid­ed. This can sig­nif­i­cant­ly relieve ther­a­pists in their day-to-day work and care of patients.

Adden­dum: In the last few weeks, a lot has hap­pened in terms of dig­i­ti­za­tion in health­care due to the ongo­ing coro­na cri­sis. We will pro­vide some inter­est­ing blog arti­cles around this top­ic here soon.