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ALast Saint Nicholas Sunday, Bavaria sparked a digital revolution, which should have garnered a little more attention between the mulled wine ban and the exit restrictions. Because in the resolutions of the Council of Ministers to contain the corona pandemic there is initially a rather powerless statement in point 9: “The Council of Ministers expressly reemphasizes the duty of the health authorities of each district or urban district to ensure follow-up full of chains of contagion. ” as if employees had previously wasted their time at the mulled wine stand, which will be prohibited in the future. But the sobering finding is accompanied by a clear and frankly revolutionary instruction: “The health authorities are obliged to immediately use the digital program ‘Sormas’ in Bavaria for the management of the pandemic and the follow-up of contacts”.
So far, you have to know, there is no trace of uniformity, not even nine months after the outbreak of the pandemic. Each health department, of which there are about 400 in Germany, works in its own way. After all, a separate program was created for Bavaria, while other health authorities have bought their own digital infrastructure. In general, the system is incomplete because there is no exchange between the health authorities or with other authorities, and there is hardly an automated step in the tedious follow-up of contacts. This leads to inefficiencies, sometimes even duplicate entries that employees could thankfully do without.
Very little digital help
If there has been talk for weeks that health authorities are overloaded, contact persons are not informed, testing capacities are exhausted, then this is due to the increasing number of new infections, but also to the lack of digital equipment in the health authorities. “Germany has by no means exhausted its digital potential in the fight against pandemics,” says Pierre-Enric Steiger, director of the Björn Steiger Foundation, a group of experts that has implemented significant improvements in the German healthcare system for decades.
That is now about to change, as the prime ministers of the federal states decided with Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel in mid-November. By the end of the year, 90 percent of the health authorities will work with Sormas, so far only 80 offices across Germany are doing so, and even fewer are already using all the functions. Neuss’s health department has been a part of it since the summer, and its director Michael Dörr is enthusiastic when he reports on it. “Sormas has brought great relief,” he says. With the presentation, calm finally returned to the office, employees no longer have to run around the house with slips, but can focus on their work on the screen because everyone has access to the required data. Even from home.
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From the first time it was recorded, Sormas never lost sight of a corona test, at each point you can see where the sample is. The result can be automatically reported to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), which announces the end of the fax, which today remains a symbol of digital backwardness in Germany. Until now there have been delays because the health authorities pass the data on to the state authority, which in turn passes it on to the RKI.
Health authorities can track where hotspots are formed in real time. In addition, the infected person can upload their digital contact diary so that the health department automatically receives the information of all possible contact persons. The monitoring of the evolution of symptoms, which the employees of the health authorities had to consult laboriously on a daily basis, could also work automatically. Neighboring circles are as informed as the public order bureau, which must issue the proper quarantine orders. That’s also possible, at the push of a button.
