A Survey on Healthcare Digitization Accelerating Transformation While Mitigating Data Protection Threats in German Hospitals

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1,0, , language: English, abstract: The digital transformation of the healthcare industry did become a trending topic in Germany of the recent years. Causes for it have been the latest technological developments, Big Data, and the need for medical elucidation of patients. Unfortunately, Germany is not considered to be the pioneer in digitizing medical care in comparison to leading countries in the European Union, although the opportunities are promising. Next to ethical and technical challenges one major threat is created by the high quality of data security, which is required by German and European law, especially starting from 2018, when the new EU General Data Protection Regulation is entering into force.

This survey paper will firstly shed a light on opportunities and challenges of healthcare digitization in Germany before elaborating on the detailed root causes of harming the digitalization. The main focus will be to provide high quality data security in hospital IT in line with the applying laws and regulations. Therefore, two approaches by different authors will be assessed and compared.