Bertelsmann Stiftung (former)
Vita
Which health app is right for me? Which offering is reliable? What distinguishes the various applications on the market from each other? Together with our Weisse Liste colleagues, we’re working on an online platform that will provide answers to these questions. Our goal is to create transparency in the growing field of digital health applications for citizens and to offer providers of good apps the opportunity to raise awareness of their commitment to quality. As part of this project and with the support of the Federal Ministry of Health, we’re developing a core set of quality criteria for health apps that can be applied through a web application. This blog post is an introduction to this project titled “AppQ.”
A frequently heard assessment of Germany’s healthcare system is that it continues to lag notably behind other countries in terms of digitization. But in which areas, exactly, does it lag behind the most? What strategies are other countries pursuing? What can we learn from the experiences of those countries? In the coming months, our goal is to undertake a comparative international study that provides insights into exactly what characterizes a successful national digitization strategy. We are therefore targeting an analysis of the framework conditions, major advancements and success factors in 17 different healthcare systems. Our basic thesis going in to this analysis is that fully leveraging digitization’s potential in the realm of healthcare involves developing a tenable national strategy with long-term objectives that features a clear vision and is advocated by political leadership – regardless of a country’s size or political system.
Increasingly, the internet is the place to go to for health information. One in 20 searches on Google is related to health. More than half of German internet users look for information online about illnesses and treatments at least once a year. However, if the common assumption is to be believed, they usually fail to find what they are looking for in the jungle of information and succeed only in becoming needlessly confused. Or they are confronted with factually inaccurate or misleading information. One proposed solution to this problem is the establishment of a National Health Portal. The German Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) has commissioned the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) to develop a concept for such a portal by the beginning of 2018. Does this idea hold up to scrutiny? Because we would like to offer both constructive and critical input to the German government’s efforts, and after frequent requests for our own opinion in past months, this blog post gathers together our current thoughts on a National Health Portal –in ten theses.