German Hospital Future Act: How to implement funding measures easily and quickly

German Hospital Future Act in a nutshell: Eleven funding measures accelerate digitization

The German federal and state governments are providing more than four billion Euros in funding through the Hospital Future Act. These funds will be allocated to measures in eleven funding categories. These include for example:

• Digital patient portals (funding item 2)
• Partially/fully automated clinical decision support (funding item 4)
• Service reconciliation and cloud computing systems (funding item 7)
• Telemedicine (funding item 9)
• IT security (funding item 10)

Originally, hospitals were threatened with penalties if they failed to implement funding criteria 2 to 6 by the end of December 2024. These are now off the table for the time being: the German Hospital Federation (DKG) and the GKV-Spitzenverband have agreed that hospitals can also complete their KHZG projects after 2024, provided they have been commissioned by the end of 2024.

The previous mandatory proof of use of the defined mandatory applications is suspended until the end of 2026. Hospitals will have to state for the first time in December 2027 whether and how the mandatory projects are used in the respective hospitals.

The KHZG: Not free of criticism

The German Hospital Future Act is driving digitization, but is also being criticized by one of the largest hospital operators, Asklepios, among others: due to the high effort involved in submitting applications and the sometimes lengthy approval processes.

Implementation also poses challenges for hospitals. This is because technical service providers, software vendors and, above all, in-house IT departments are working at full capacity or are overloaded. Therefore, timely implementation by the end of 2024 was not feasible for many hospitals.

"In our view, funding programs designed purely for investment measures fall short against the backdrop of massively overburdened hospital IT and the lack of specialist staff. Modern, scalable IT infrastructures are based on cloud technologies and software-as-a-service. For hospitals, this means less initial investment, but recurring costs. At the same time, cloud and SaaS solutions relieve IT in the long term by outsourcing infrastructure maintenance and operation. The postponement of the deadline therefore allows to catch a breath in the short term - but without a fundamental rethink of IT investments and their promotion, nothing will change in the chronic overload of hospital IT," comments Tobias Anger, CTO at Telepaxx Medical Data, on the deadline extension.