Some health insurers, including the Innungskrankenkassen (IKK) and the Siemens-Betriebskrankenkasse (SBK), are calling for more quality and transparency in healthcare for patients in Germany as service providers.
The demands are also supported by the German Medical Technology Association (BVMed), which focuses primarily on home care and medical aids, because quality concepts in this area are crucial, not a low additional contribution from some health insurers.
In a position paper on the occasion of the federal elections, the IKK, like BVMed, had spoken out in favor of more quality orientation. Standardization and quality assurance procedures are seen as particularly important. Insured persons must have clarity about how high the additional contribution rates of the individual health insurance funds are, but also which services are ultimately approved by the health insurance funds.
The SBK expressed itself similarly because quality transparency has priority also for the operational health insurance company, which explained only recently by Dr. Gertrud Demmler as the executive committee of the SBK. Quality transparency is the prerequisite for improvement measures in the GKV, because a low additional contribution is often not associated with a high-quality standard. Quality assessment and the final comparison are therefore the be-all and end-all of good healthcare. For this, however, uniform and systematic surveys of the experiences of insured persons would have to take place, according to Dr. Demmler.
BVMed supports the advancing health insurance companies with regard to strengthening quality and transparency, but especially in the field of medical aids, which must be put into practice with quality specifications. A nationwide quality control system for the supply of medical aids could therefore be helpful. Health insurance funds must establish uniform specifications, especially in the areas of methodology, evaluation criteria, and transparency, in order to achieve the goal of quality comparison for insureds.
Source: www.pharma-relations.de