"Digital Patient Journey Oncology"

According to the prevailing opinion, digital healthcare solutions offer considerable opportunities in improving the quality of care for oncologic patients in almost all treatment phases from the prevention to aftercare. However, there is often a lack of an integrative view on the "digitalized" care and treatment pathways on the one hand and considerable regulatory barriers and obstacles in the implementation of developed digital healthcare solutions on the other. In this context, physicians, technicians and clinical practitioners as well as lawyers and health insurance experts, have come together in a series of workshops under the direction of the BDI and facilitated by SKC to develop a structured and clear view of necessary regulatory changes.

Based on this series of workshops, SKC in cooperation with the Federal Association of German Industry (BDI), the member companies of the BDI's digital health initiative has developed a study on digitalized care paths in oncology. For three selected oncological indications (lung carcinoma, prostate carcinoma and malignant melanoma) the current care situation was analyzed and existing care deficits in the individual care phases from prevention to aftercare were identified. In a two-stage process, digital health care solutions were described using design thinking methods, which could address the identified deficits in the individual phases with the aim of achieving potential positive health care effects. Thus, technical and regulatory hurdles were worked out which must be overcome during the implementation and analyzed, grouped and prioritized the different implementation obstacles of the possible digital health care solutions from a regulatory point of view.

Although the described digital health solutions are based on varying different technological approaches, many commonalities for necessary framework conditions, regulatory challenges and technical prerequisites have been identified. From this, the participants developed a catalogue of 13 recommendations for action, which can be divided into five fields of action - data protection, interoperability, reimbursement options, data access and awareness:

• Harmonization of current data protection laws (federal, state, Bundeswehr, church)
• Refining and harmonizing of the regulations on anonymization of health data (defining uniform legal provisions)
• Revision of data agreement consents and creation of the legal possibility of data donatio
• Enabling cloud-based access to health data and removing existing cloud barriers in current data protection regulations

• Setting binding uniform communication and data standards for health data to ensure syntactical interoperability.
• Semantic interoperability standards for cross-sectoral data exchange.

• Reimbursement options for digital health applications in healthcare provision and disease prevention
• Provision of financial incentives enabling an adequate remuneration for the use of digital support systems in diagnostic and therapeutic care
• Remuneration or surcharges for comprehensive high-quality, digital documentation

• Access to patient-related, anonymized or pseudonymized health and treatment data from care provision processes (possible via a trust centers)
•  Access for the healthcare industry to care and billing data of SHIs for research purposes
•  Expansion of the necessary register contents and data access for research and supply purposes

•  Initiation of an awareness campaign on the benefits and advantages, but also on the risks and prerequisites of digital health applications and services.

The introduced project result is an example of our activities. The complete 110-page paper "Digital Patient Journey Oncology" with all the recommendations and explanations can be obtained free of charge on request. Please contact Ms. Janina Spottke (spottke@skc-beratung.de) to obtain your copy. 

SKC supports medical technology and pharmaceutical companies in the development of digital care solutions using design-thinking methods and focuses on the reimbursability and benefit assessment of digital applications.