Patients advocates demand transparency portal for practices; doctors fight back
After the clinic atlas launch, patient advocates now call for a transparency portal for doctors' practices. Health insurance physicians see this as populism.
Checking attendance does not go down well with doctors.
(Image: loreanto/Shutterstock.com)
The Patient Protection Foundation is calling on Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach – to create a practice atlas containing information on the quality of medical practices as a counterpart to the clinic atlas – launched in May. This was reported by Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland. According to Eugen Brysch, Chairman of the Patient Protection Foundation, a connected evaluation portal could also be used to record patient satisfaction.
Responsibility lies with the BMG
According to RND, patients should then be able to find out in detail about attendance, the error culture, the quality of care and the medical services on offer. "The evaluation portal must be part of the practice atlas. As with the clinic atlas, the Federal Ministry of Health is responsible for this. In addition to patient ratings, a quality index should be included, which should be checked by the Medical Service, for example," Brysch explained to heise online. An important factor here is "that patients need to know when the doctor is present or not". To this end, the associations of statutory health insurance physicians should check the attendance times of their members and communicate this transparently.
However, the board members of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV) describe Brysch's demand as "populism in its purest form". It is astonishing that "after the disaster of the state introduction of a hospital atlas, which is massively flawed and creates more uncertainty than quality classification, someone [...] is seriously calling for the introduction of such an instrument for outpatient care". The KBV also sharply criticizes "anonymous reporting systems, in which anyone can post any allegations and suspicions without checking them". In the view of the KBV, this shows that it is not about improving quality, but about pure self-promotion. The KBV also criticizes the fact that patient representatives are not "seeking to join forces with us".
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Clinic Atlas as a model
The clinic atlas was launched at the beginning of May. This was followed by criticism from clinics, among others, that the atlas was not trustworthy and too complex for laypeople. Several updates followed. For example, the Clinic Atlas no longer contains "the search for specific diagnoses and procedures designed for specialists". The function was removed "due to the complexity of the results". The "search criteria have also been changed to make them more user-friendly by preselecting care occasions or operations", according to Bundes-Klinik-Atlas.de.
(mack)
