[One year of the German Health System Modernization Act and its impact on quality in medicine from the Joint Federal Committee's point of view].
The objective of the German Health System Modernisation Act (GMG) has been to release probable profitability reserves within the current healthcare system by increasing the regulative competition between health insurances and healthcare providers and simultaneously improve the quality of healthcare. But the legislator has deliberately excluded the Statutory Health Insurances' services catalogue and the selection of its contents from this competition and conferred the guidance competence for shaping the contents of the statutory services catalogue and specifying quality requirements on healthcare delivery to the Joint Federal Committee. The legislator's objectives are targeted to cross-sectoral regulations, whereas the modelling of the organisational structure of the Joint Federal Committee and its statutory tasks still remain to be strongly sector-related, thus compromising the legal security of the Joint Federal Committee's normative decisions. The Joint Federal Committee has successfully taken the first hurdles of regulatory orders concerning the limitation of certain service areas and the formation of new fixed price groups. More emphasis of its future work will be placed on the further development and the cross-sectoral coordination of quality assurance measures.
Hess
Rainer
R
D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence* / Q000592:standards; D005858:Germany; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care