Telematics and nursing: does the German electronic Health Card improve patient care for persons with nursing needs?

GMS Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie

关键词: nursing;    patient safety;    telematics;    electronic health cards;   

DOI  :  

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Current developments towards a German electronic Health Card raise the question whether the card is capable of improving care also for persons with special nursing needs including short-term as well as long-term care patients. The aging of the population - also in Germany - is coupled with an increase in the number of long-term care patients. They are patients who need medical as well as nursing care and who often need care provided by changing care settings (ambulatory care/home care vs. hospital) during the course of their illness. Nursing Science has been recognizing the importance of an uninterrupted way of providing patient care (continuity of care) as a central issue and has been developing concepts and instruments for case management and discharge management. Both approaches provide mechanisms proven under real life conditions for transferring patients safely from one to another setting. Although nursing telematics covers a wide range of topics, from semantic interoperability to telecare solutions, its primary applications, namely case management and discharge management, are only poorly supported by information and communication technology. It is therefore not surprising, that the electronic Health Card in Germany was planned without making any reference to case management and discharge management. Current concepts for the applications of the card simply ignore the scenario of transferring patients with special nursing needs between care settings. Though adjustments of the legal foundations of the electronic Health Card had been made recently, nurses will still not be able to exchange nursing summaries electronically by means of the card because nurses working in nursing homes and for ambulatory nursing services have no access rights for the data on the card. The full exploitation of the card and its potential for innovation does not only depend, however, on granting access rights to all nurses but also on issuing electronic Health Professional Cards (eHPC) to nurses similar to the ones of physicians and pharmacists. As the eHPC is a basic prerequisite for using the electronic Health Card its implementation for nurses is required within a short time frame. In conclusion, only when the electronic health card and its applications are available to professional nursing care the growing number of patients with special nursing needs will benefit from its introduction.

【 授权许可】

Unknown