Author: Le Vin Chin, Editor-in-Chief, Clinerion Ltd
12.12.2019, Basel, Switzerland
On November 7th, the German parliament passed the Digital Healthcare Act (Digitale-Versorgung-Gesetz - DVG), which legislates the increase of digitalization throughout the German healthcare system, from apps, to reimbursement, to online consultation, to e-prescription.
The fact that digital health solutions become reimbursable in Germany is but one major upheaval in the country. An important feature will be the development of a national electronic patient record (EPR) system by 2021, which will consolidate all relevant patient data from hospital information systems, health insurers, general practitioners, etc.
This act clearly aims to improve efficiencies in the healthcare system, as well as support a better level of care for patients. However, in addition, the act will also allow patient data – anonymized – to be used for research purposes. This will also have major repercussions for German clinical research – patient data can provide RWD for clinical studies, HEOR investigations, market access activities and so on – and thereby for bringing innovative drugs to patients in Germany.
Germany is, of course, not alone. Countries around the world are moving forward with similar initiatives, and the benefits seem clear: better targeting of treatments for patients, quicker access to new treatments for their populations, improved research reputation for researchers, income streams for hospitals better able to be found for clinical studies.
One key example is the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN), which brings together all the major teaching hospitals in Switzerland, and renders their patient data mutually query-able and interoperable. Clinerion is proud to be the SPHN’s executive technology partner using the proprietary and patented technology of the Patient Network Explorer as the base platform for querying the secured data of each member hospital.
Another is the Republic of Korea’s national Precision Medicine Enterprise project, a patient data platform with twin pillars being the development of a universal common data model (as part of the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) consortium) and a precision medicine cloud HIS platform (P-HIS).
In Europe, EHDEN (European Health Data & Evidence Network) is harmonizing 100 million anonymized health records across multiple hospitals, primary care networks, regional databases, and similar, on a federated ecosystem of institutions generating clinical data, with researchers across academia and industry.
This initiative is supported by certified and qualified SMEs harmonizing clinical data by standardizing health data to the OMOP (Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership) common data model and the utilization of analytical tools such as those developed by the OHDSI (Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics) open science collaboration. Clinerion is again proud to have been certified by EHDEN to support the building of a federated health data network in Europe.
Data is key, and being able to analyse patient data for research and insights into diseases, treatments and outcomes is invaluable. In pursuit of our goal of bringing faster patient access to medicines and improved health outcomes, Clinerion supports access to data, by expanding our own Patient Network Explorer coverage.
We cover 21 countries directly (see our recent news about Arabkir Hospital in Armenia), and we also nurture an ecosystem of data partners around the world (see our recent news on partnerships with Massive Bio and EvidNet). And we partner with technology leaders to further improve our own technology platform (see our recent news on partnerships with Semedy).
Wide-scale data integrations are becoming the norm – and creating the potential for huge leaps in healthcare standards and capabilities. Clinerion and Patient Network Explorer are ready.
