Last but not least: Digital Health. Also, here I would like to ask you a few questions:
Less than a year after CGM was approved as the first provider for telematics infrastructure in the German healthcare sector, other players are now entering the market. What is your assessment of the new market participants?
Similar to Payments and self-service, Digital Health is also a niche market. In particular, the technical components in the telematics infrastructure (TI) are subject to major approval hurdles in terms of security and technology. Due to the attractiveness of the healthcare market (2017 sales approx.- 72 billion EUR; #Trx >5 billion through legal applications; comparison Germany 2017 approx. 3 billion girocard Trx) it is worth participating and therefore more and more providers will occupy the market. Today there are already five network providers.
The TI is the basis for countless health applications, opening up many business models. The development of the TI for panel physicians and health insurance companies will be completed by the end of 2019. By then more than 150.000 doctors’ practices and 20.000 pharmacies will be networked with each other. In addition, one million providers in unchartered healthcare professions will also use TI.
How does SHC position itself in the Digital Health market?
We at SHC have accompanied the development of TI by advising the companies involved and continuously expanded this know-how. We will use the resulting potential to implement business models in the modern Digital Health market together with and for our customers and to achieve the necessary approvals from the gematik.
However, we do not only offer consulting, but we are also active as providers of platforms whose implementation requires special know-how and which are necessary for the TI. In 2016, for example, we set up our first SaaS platform in the form of a card management system for issuing identity cards from Digital Health card terminals (gSMC-KT) for two customers. All Digital Health card terminals connected to the TI in Germany carry a card, which is processed by our card management.
We, together with partner companies, are currently setting up a platform for issuing practice cards (SMC-B) and health professional cards (HBA). Here we have gained top-class partner companies in order to achieve our goal in 2019: being able to act as providers of these cards for all sectors (doctors, dentists, pharmacists, etc.).
What are the biggest drivers in the healthcare market in 2019?
A major goal of TI is to provide a secure infrastructure for highly sensitive health data, to digitize the health care system and to open it up for innovative value-added applications. The first application that will bring real added value is the emergency data set, which will be tested in 2019.
In 2019, pharmacists will also be joining TI to network doctors and hospitals. For pharmacists, the application AMTS (Drug Therapy Safety), for which TI was originally planned, is of particular interest, in order to prevent drug interactions
These digital services will be the drivers for the coming years. New business models will evolve and SHC will provide support for their development and implementation.