More than 70 percent of Germans have never looked at their electronic patient file (ePA), so they don’t know what data is stored there and haven’t added or deleted anything. This has now been revealed by a representative survey by the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations (VZBV). It corresponds to what health insurance companies and general practitioners report. The Technicians’ Health Insurance last year, for example, created files for 11.5 million insured people, but only 900,000 are actively using them so far.
“In its current form, the ePA is only of limited practical use,” criticizes Markus Beier, Federal Chairman of the German Association of General Practitioners. in the newspapers of the Funke media group. So far, this has mainly been “an unsorted PDF collection that practices can do little with in everyday life.” Eugen Brysch, board member of the German Patient Protection Foundation, told ZEIT that this is “more than sobering,” “especially in view of the 20 years of preparation and tens of billions of euros in development costs.”
