BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach is counting on significant improvements in treatment when electronic patient files (ePA) are launched for everyone at the beginning of next year. The SPD politician said in Berlin on Tuesday that it is crucial that all the data needed at the time of treatment is available in future. "This is now the absolute exception." According to a law already passed by the traffic light coalition, all people with statutory health insurance are to receive an e-file from their health insurance provider at the beginning of 2025 - unless they refuse it for themselves.

The large-scale project is due to start on January 15, 2025, initially in two model regions in Franconia and Hamburg. Four weeks later, the ePA is expected to be available nationwide for patients, surgeries, clinics and pharmacies. It is intended to be a personal memory for medications, findings and laboratory values, for example, and accompany patients throughout their lives. This should also avoid drug interactions and unnecessary multiple examinations. E-files were already introduced as an optional service in 2021, but have hardly been used so far.

Lauterbach said that people would quickly get to know the benefits. When digital data is available, patients can also have findings and values explained to them using language models with artificial intelligence, Lauterbach explained. In the future, it would be possible to have a "companion doctor" who would prepare for visits to the practice and also help with explanations afterwards.

With regard to security, the Minister made it clear that the data would be stored separately so that potential attackers would only be able to access a patient's "data capsule". It is not possible to break into the entire German data set. The President of the Federal Office for Information Security, Claudia Plattner, said that the encryption of patient data meets the highest standards and still enables secure use in everyday healthcare.

The e-file will have content right from the start, as the head of the digital department at the Ministry of Health, Susanne Ozegowski, said. This will include a list of medication taken, which will be automatically generated from standard electronic prescriptions. Doctors treating patients will be granted access rights for 90 days to read and fill in medical findings and laboratory values - triggered when the insurance card is inserted in the practice or clinic./sam/DP/mis