Germany: health IT on the rise

With 4.2 million employees and a total healthcare spending of € 240 billion Euros (10.7% of the GDP in 2005), the German healthcare system is the biggest in Europe. Public insurance accounts for about 60% of the sum total. The rest is with the federal states, private health insurance companies and the citizens themselves.

When it comes to health IT though, the German balance looks different. In 2005, an estimated 1% of the total spending went into information technology, certainly far less than the 2 to 3 per cent quoted target for other western health systems.

The projections look brighter, though. Frost and Sullivan predict that Health IT’s share of German healthcare expenditure will rise to 5% in 2010, while other projections say it could even rise to as much as 8% in 2020. This is potentially explosive growth. The projections take into account both increasing efforts to establish regional electronic medical records and a governmental infrastructure project based on smartcards which has, after considerable initial delay, gained momentum recently.

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Germany's e-health programme: contested but driven forward The German national health IT project is about to connect 2,200 hospitals, 100,000 GPs, 21,000 pharmacies and 200 public health insurance companies. In contrast to most other European countries, Germany has chosen to start with security issues and is currently setting up a smartcard infrastructure. EMRs in Germany: who will be in charge? The German national health IT project is under fire, but that does not mean e-health is not taking off. There are numerous efforts under way with shared electronic medical records (EMR) – with and without smartcard authentification – driven by IT companies, private hospital chains, public health insurance and regional governments.