Helios Hospitals to connect doctors via EPR

Helios hospital group is launching a Germany-wide electronic patient record project to allow electronic communication with referring doctors in private practices.

The system is running in two regions already, and a wider roll out to most of the 58 Helios hospitals is in place for next year.

Technically, the system is a web service enabling doctors in private practices to access the medical data of their patients directly from a hospital information system.

Hagen Kellner, head of IT at the Helios hospital in Erfurt/Thuringia , told E-Health Europe: "Access is granted to referral letters, radiological pictures, laboratory data and reports about surgeries and medical intervention”. The Erfurt hospital is acting as the nucleus for the rollout, with more than 40 doctors already using it.

There is no central data storage, rather the information remains with the institution where the patient was treated. The system uses the concept of the ‘elektronische Fallakte’ (electronic case record), a decentralised EPR which is backed by all major hospital associations and private hospital chains in Germany. The patient has to give his consent to making his data available and he or she can choose which doctors get access.

The system will be expanded next year,CEO of the Helios-region Hesse-Thuringia, Olaf Jedersberger, told EHE. “The goal is that hospital doctors can access data from their ambulatory colleagues as well."

This function is part of the new technical specification of the ‘Fallakte’, version 1.2. It is currently being developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Software Engineering on behalf of the Deutsche Krankenhaus Gesellschaft (German Association of Hospitals).

The Helios-project is a joint project with health IT companies, GSD and Ispro, and Helios’ parent company Fresenius Medical Care. GSD is owned by Siemens, and Ispro is the hospital-networking division of the CompuGroup conglomerate.

“It is important to mention that we exclusively use open standards so that that we could change our partners at any time”, said Jedersberger. The project cost around €70.000, with a further €3000 annually for the service provided by Ispro at Erfurt hospital. “The contract for the nationwide provision of the service is currently being negotiated," said Jedersberger.

The technical specification of the ‘Fallakte’ project is open source and can be used by anyone interested (www.fallakte.de). All major hospital IT providers in Germany, including Siemens, Agfa Healthcare, iSoft/IBA, and Tieto Enator are currently implementing the specification into their respective solutions. It is likely that the ‘Fallakte’ network will be the first truly interoperable hospital EPR network, independent of the German smartcard project.

Adding doctors in private practice to the ‘Fallakte’ pilot has proved difficult, however. Some doctors argue that the benefit of accessing medical data from hospitals is not big enough to justify investments or going online with their practice.

Helios is in the news frequently at the moment. Just days ago, the hospital chain succeeded in taking over Krefeld hospital, a large public hospital in Northrhine-Westfalia. The deal was the biggest hospital takeover in Germany this year. Helios now claims to be the leading private hospital chain in Central Europe in terms of annual turnover. A month ago, Helios also announced the rollout of ‘Neuronet’, a Germany-wide telemedicine network to improve acute stroke care.