Improving the Hospital-Patient Relationship with Digital Communication

At the first Biel Conference “Healthcare of the Future” (5th of April 2019) Ulli Prokosch gave a keynote presentation on “Digital Patient Communication: Improving the Hospital-Patient Relationship”. In this talk he illustrated that current personal electronic health record systems such as the German “Gesundheitsakte” (e.g. provided by several health insurance companies), the Austrian ELGA or the Swiss EPD are designed to be a “intersectoral patient-controlled storage of health documents” but not a means to improve hospital-patient-communication. For the latter purpose he encourages university hospitals to establish EHR-integrated Patient Portals which provide functionalities to support pre- and postadmission care scenarios, but also research scenarios such as informing the patient about the potential use of his/her care data for research purposes and engaging him actively in such process via interactive options to change his consent options whenever he wants. See his presentation for full details.