Versorgung: Pflegebranche beklagt hohen Aufwand nur fürs Karten-Einlesen

Private care providers are complaining about the significant amount of time spent on manually entering insured card information from patients in doctor's offices. Bernd Meurer, president of the Federal Association of Private Social Services, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur that every available minute is used to care for the growing number of care-requiring individuals.

"The madness of having care staff wait hours in doctor's offices or wasting time on transporting insured cards is simply not affordable for Germany," he stated.

The issue arises when many care-requiring individuals need to have their insured cards scanned in doctor's offices once every quarter – for example, if they're living in a nursing home, taking prescription medications, or receiving in-home care services. Often, staff members from care services and care facilities bring these cards to the doctor's offices.

President Meurer warned that "there is hardly anything more valuable in Germany than the working time of care staff." He called for "digitalization to be taken seriously and streamline processes."

According to a scenario calculation by the association, there is a substantial potential for cost savings. In a survey of 1,016 member companies, it was found that they incur approximately 21.6 hours of organizational effort per quarter due to the quarterly scanning of electronic health cards. This amounts to 86.4 hours per year.

If applied to the 26,799 outpatient services and full-time care facilities nationwide, this would result in an annual effort of around 2.3 million hours. Additionally, the scenario suggests that waiting times in doctor's offices would average 26 minutes per visit.

The association specifically demands that insured individuals, care facility staff, or relatives should no longer need to visit doctor's offices with a card or smartphone in the future. Instead, legislation should be enacted so that doctor's offices can digitally and billable retrieve the insured status via the secured data highway of the healthcare sector (teleinformatics infrastructure). This could allow the saved time to be used for care and care-related tasks.