The electronic patient record (ePA) in Germany: potential for physicians

The problem: Health data is stored in different places in medical practices

You are probably familiar with this from your own day-to-day practice: sharing diagnoses often involves a considerable amount of administrative work - and each practice or location keeps to its own findings. In this way, revealing knowledge about the patient's state of health cannot be developed on an interdisciplinary basis.

The three advantages of the ePA at a glance

This is changing with the electronic patient file: it brings with it a great deal of potential for medical practices and hospitals. The biggest advantages are obvious:

1. Quick and easy access to patient information

Gone are the long days of leafing through medical records or requesting reports from colleagues: The ePA provides a comprehensive overview of a patient's health status, including previous diagnoses, medications and treatments.

Language barriers or dementia in patients can also make decisions more difficult because you, as a physician, may have incomplete information. However, if you work with the electronic patient file, you have access to the released data of your colleagues at any time. This allows you to make better informed decisions and, for example, prevent drug interactions or adjust your treatment accordingly.

2. Reduced workload

The big advantage of the ePA is that it stores all information centrally eliminating the need for cumbersome switching between different systems. The result: you can concentrate on the essentials, namely patient care.

This should put an end to the times when saving or reading in findings held up processes in practices, patient IDs posed puzzles or queries to another practice took up unnecessary time.

In short: With the electronic patient file, the administrative effort decreases considerably.

3. Simplified communication

The ePA not only offers you advantages in your everyday practice, but also when communicating with other healthcare providers. The stored information can be exchanged quickly and easily. This means that everyone involved is always up to date, and decisions can be better coordinated.

The image data issue

However, one problem remains for the time being: So far, the legislator does not provide for physicians such as radiologists to store image data in their patient's electronic medical record. Although this should be possible at some point, the medical information objects (MIO) have not yet been specified for this purpose.

However, images are essential for the diagnosis, for example in the context of a follow-up, especially in chronically ill people.