• Choose a team name: Digital Natives

Summarize your insights with a short description (about 150 words).

ePA stands for electronic patient record and is a digital platform used in the healthcare sector to store and manage patient health information. The ePA provides doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers with access to a patient’s medical history, diagnoses, test results, and treatment plans. The ePA also enables patients to access their medical records, monitor their health status, and share information with their healthcare providers.

DiGA stands for Digital Health Applications and refers to medical apps or digital tools that can be prescribed by doctors and reimbursed by health insurance providers. DiGAs are intended to improve patient care and health outcomes by supporting prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. DiGAs can address a wide range of health issues, including mental health, chronic conditions, and physical disabilities.

Both the ePA and the DiGA are part of the attempt to digitise the German healthcare system such that it benefits healthcare workers (doctors, nurses etc), patients and science.

Some questions

How will be ensured that every user, no matter their digital capabilities, will be able to handle the ePA?

In what way will they visualise who has when access to what data?

Why does every BKK implement its own ePA?

How hard is the development and licensing of a DiGA?

How Are the developers payed?

What is the challenge you would like to tackle?

Currently, there are 45 active DiGAs. They tackle different medical topics such as depression, COPD, insomnia etc. But many illnesses which could potentially be eased by a DiGA.

Our case is asthma. Asthma is an inflammatory disease of the airways which cannot be cured as of today. It can be controlled by medication and various other factors. There is a device, called a Peak-Flow, which is often used to measure ones conditions at home to get more than a subjective feeling of the state of ones asthma.

To support people in taking their meds, using their peak-flow and filling in their asthma diary, a DiGA could be very helpful.

We want to checkout current asthma apps, find out why they are not a DiGA and try to improve their approach to the problem

Why do you expect your engagement to be useful?

One of our group members has asthma and remembers the annoying asthma diary and how his doctor was always annoyed by him not taking care of it with more discipline.

Since there are digital approaches which are not in the DiGA register yet, there might be problems with these apps or with the DiGA registration process.

Who are your intended stakeholders?

Asthma patients, doctors, developers of asthma apps

Reflection

Wer hat welchen Beitrag geleistet?

Nachdem wir uns alle eingelesen und unser neues Wissen miteinander geteilt haben, haben wir länger über ein mögliches interessantes Thema gesprochen. Ausformuliert hat den text Simon.

Was habt ihr gelernt?

Vieles über die ePA und warum diese nur so schleppend voran kommt. Einige von uns hatten noch nie von DiGAs gehört.

Was lief gut?

Die Kommunikation in unsere Chatgruppe lief reibungslos, obwohl 2/3 krank im Bett lagen.

Was möchtet ihr verbessern?

Entscheidungsfindung in einer Gruppe ist oft nicht so einfach, so auch bei uns. Allerdings kostet es den Grossteil der Zeit, darüber zu diskutieren, obwohl niemand eine starke Meinung hat. Wir hätten früher mit der Aufgabe beginnen sollen, was allerdings wegen Krankheit nicht möglich war. Das schreiben in diesem Blocksystem ermöglich leider kein gemeinsames Bearbeiten eines Posts.