Despite the ongoing digitalization of the healthcare system since the corona pandemic, it is still far from being crisis-proof. Nikolai Savaskan from the Neukölln health department and Mesut Yavuz from the Nuremberg company Yes Automation complain about this in an essay on lessons from COVID-19 available online on Heise. According to them, there is a risk of lock-in, i.e. dependence on proprietary software manufacturers, of hospitals and health authorities after the lockdown. The CrowdStrike disaster showed how great the dangers of this are.
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As a result of the pandemic, the federal government entered into an 800 million euro agreement to digitize the public health service (ÖGD). Considering the previous work with paper, fax and at most Excel, as well as the associated paperwork for contact tracking during the first corona wave, the technical upgrade of the health authorities for the 21st century was “a necessity”, the physicians wrote. The first tranche of the ÖGD agreement in 2021, with 260 million euros, went mainly to hardware such as whiteboards, mobile phones and laptops. This means that at least the technical prerequisites for digitization exist, but it does not work that way yet.
Warning about dependency on Microsoft
The duo calculated that only 5 percent of the total funding amount went to cross-border digitalization solutions, while 41 percent went to individual projects and 54 percent to non-cross-country measures. Further paper on OGD funding program First. For example, the federal states applied for funding eleven times for the same application – software for all state health authorities with many duplicate structures. Generally, insiders complain that the steps taken so far have “focused mostly on short-term solutions rather than long-term, crisis-proof interoperable systems.” By the way, millions of rupees will be spent “unnecessarily and ultimately inefficiently”.
At the same time, health authorities and ministries “have become too dependent on Microsoft,” Savaskan and Yavuz give an example. This means that they will no longer have any room for maneuver when it comes to pricing license fees. The researchers counter this with the “numerous advantages” that open source offers. These include elements such as interoperability and shared data exchange, scalability, easy collaboration with all stakeholders, data protection, security and transparency as well as “permanent procedural learning.” Paving the way “for a digitally sovereign OGD in Germany” with this open approach is overdue.
He is in OGD agreement Includes the mission statement “Digital Health Department 2025” According to experts, the aim is to achieve interoperability already at all levels. Unfortunately, this was not taken into account in the BMG funding tender. On the contrary, the relevant guidelines stipulate that open source licenses should be preferred. However, in practice this requirement is still not given enough attention. It is therefore also necessary to strengthen digital skills in the OGD and establish a digital global “One Health Platform”. In an interview with Heise Online in 2022, Savaskan not only criticized complaints in digital reporting.
(CWO)
