Starting in May, patients should know more about the quality of the clinics. The hospital association previously presents its own offer.

Here you have a kind of hospital atlas, in miniature version. Photo: Marcus Brandt/dpa

SEDAN taz | The timing is certainly no coincidence: shortly before the Federal Ministry of Health wants to create more transparency about the quality of hospital procedures with the “Atlas Hospital”, the industrial association of German hospitals appears around the corner with its own expanded offer. Is Karl Lauterbach's (SPD) hospital atlas still necessary?

After some differences between the federal and state governments, at the end of March the Hospital Transparency Law came into force. It is the basis of the hospital atlas, which aims to publish the quality of hospital care based on key figures such as case numbers, staffing and complication rates, using existing and additionally collected data.

The Hospital Transparency Law is part of a broad hospital reform, the core of which has not yet been decided and about which there has also been a conflict for months between the federal government and the state governments, but also with the German Hospital Association.

This same hospital company presented this Monday an expanded version of its hospital directory. What was previously mainly an overview of basic data from all hospitals, i.e. with information on contact details, services offered and more, now also aims to create transparency about the quality of specific treatments. In an online search mask, hospital-specific case numbers and other parameters can be queried and compared by treatment type.

“We are very excited to see what the Federal Minister of Health wants to contribute with his atlas,” said the German Hospital Association at the launch. Board member Gerald Gaß suspected that Minister Lauterbach and his hospital atlas had political rather than qualitative motives, for example due to the better performance of large clinics. The German Hospital Association had previously received funding from the Federal Ministry of Health of 10,000 euros per month for its board of directors, which was not extended until mid-2023.

Hospital Atlas should be online from May 16

“Clearly, the clinic lobby has seen the law as a motivation to communicate offers and services for inpatients more transparently than before,” said a spokesperson for the Federal Minister of Health. However, the hospital company's new offer does not replace the hospital atlas: according to the Ministry of Health, this should offer patients, in addition to additional data, the possibility of evaluating alternatives. For example, it does not make sense to indicate the number of cases without a reference value, as in the directory of the German Hospital Association.

According to the Ministry of Health, the hospital atlas will be publicly available on May 16 after a two-week testing phase.