E-prescription failures: Statutory health insurance doctors criticize Gematik

The E-prescriptions have been a regular source of trouble since their mandatory introduction in January 2024. The telematics infrastructure (TI) is repeatedly down for hours . Last week , ABDA President Thomas Preis expressed his anger , calling it an unacceptable level of unreliability that even exceeds that of Deutsche Bahn. "A canceled train is annoying, but an unavailable e-prescription can have significant consequences for people's health," said Preis.

The regular outages are not only for the This is a nuisance not only for pharmacies , but also for the medical profession. On Thursday, the board of the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KV) in Hesse issued a statement calling on Gematik to take action. "The Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) is the majority shareholder in Gematik, the National Agency for Digital Medicine, with a 51 percent stake. And Gematik, unfortunately, isn't delivering," complained KV Chairman Frank Dastych.

The current chaos surrounding server outages and malfunctioning e-prescriptions is evidence that the leadership of Gematik lacks the necessary awareness of the problem. "This will reliably lead to the digital transformation of the German healthcare system. Gematik is not only unable to ensure a stable and high-performance network, it is also unwilling to adequately communicate system outages. This leads to chaos in practices and endangers patients," Dastych said.

The Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) has the reins of power and must assume this responsibility. "Because if those responsible at Gematik simply complain about the complexity of the task and simultaneously use this as a repeated excuse for why the constant outages occur, then they are clearly not up to the task," explains the KV chairman.

Gematik has been confronted with similar allegations for months. However, the digital agency primarily sees external service providers as responsible . "Illnesses in the IT system are often due to impairments of the underlying services or components," a Gematik spokesperson stated in July. The respective service provider or manufacturer usually resolves the issues and can "usually be implemented quickly."

Gematik says it carefully analyzes every outage and aims to increase the reliability of its technology. "This includes technical measures such as monitoring, early fault detection, and redundancy concepts, as well as organizational developments in incident management and cooperation with the respective industrial partners," the spokesperson explained.