eHealth: German clinic atlas goes online

After another postponement, the hospital atlas is now online. The aim is to provide patients in Germany with "comprehensible and transparent" information about the 1700 hospitals on offer and to enable them to choose a hospital based on this information. Initially, the hospital atlas will display basic data such as case numbers and complication rates.

The website bundes-klinik-atlas.de contains data on the scope and quality of care as well as staffing levels in hospitals. It is part of a hospital reform that has been announced for years and is intended to change the hospital landscape and lead to greater specialization. An agreement on the Hospital Transparency Act first had to be reached in the Mediation Committee for the Hospital Atlas.

Hospitals must provide data

The BMG commissioned the Institute for Quality Assurance and Transparency in Healthcare (IQTIG) to produce the hospital atlas. Together with the Institut für das Entgeltsystem im Krankenhaus GmbH (InEK), the IQTIG provides the data – the latter is the German DRG institute (Diagnosis Related Groups system) that publishes the DRG catalog and develops it further on behalf of the BMG. Hospitals must report data to InEK every quarter, which means additional bureaucratic work for the hospitals. The BMG has also concluded a cooperation agreement with the "Weisse Liste". The Bertelsmann Foundation had discontinued the portal, which already provided information on the quality of hospitals, citing the launch of the hospital atlas as the reason.

Criticism in the run-up

Eugen Brysch, Chairman of the German Patient Protection Foundation, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) that the Hospital Atlas was still missing crucial information. "The quality of patient management in the clinic is not recorded," Brysch told dpa. There is still a lack of binding guidelines and assessment factors that consider work on and with patients. For example, older people need to be hospitalized much more frequently and elderly patients with multiple illnesses need more time for successful treatment. The complication rate is therefore higher for these patients.

The German Hospital Federation (DKG) had already voiced criticism in advance –, partly due to the additional bureaucracy involved. DKG head Gerald Gaß called the atlas "superfluous and misleading", according to Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland. The DKG had only recently published an updated version of its hospital directory, which is used by 500,000 people every month. In addition, the federal states had initially rejected the Hospital Transparency Act. One of the fears was that the number of hospitals would fall as a result of innovations such as the hospital atlas. The increased transparency could harm smaller hospitals in particular.

(mack)