Die elektronische Patientenakte

Study paper from 2019 in the field of law - Miscellaneous, grade: 2.3, Georg-August University Göttingen, language: German.

In light of demographic change and the associated epidemiological shift, the proportion of chronically ill and multimorbid patients in the German population is increasing. This leads to a growing demand for improvements in medical care, and the provision of medical services is constantly faced with new challenges. Cost pressure, staff shortages, lack of time, and resource scarcity are just a few examples that contribute to a significant loss of quality in the healthcare sector.

In our age of digitalization, it is also important to consider information and communication technology in healthcare to address potential problems. Internationally, digitalization in healthcare is referred to as e-health and serves as a collective term for tools and services based on information and communication technologies aimed at improving prevention, diagnosis, treatment, as well as monitoring and management in the fields of health and lifestyle.

Essentially, digitalization offers many opportunities to make processes more efficient, allowing for cost savings and compensating for staff shortages—especially in rural areas—through telemedicine. Furthermore, within the framework of digitalization, the networking of patient care can be improved to enable the rapid exchange of large amounts of data, thereby avoiding duplicate examinations and shortening treatment times. In this context, the electronic patient record, which will also be discussed in this paper, plays a key role.