Standardizing Germany's Electronic Disease Management Program for Bronchial Asthma

Disease management programs coordinate and manage treatment between physicians and across sectors of the healthcare system. The aim is to reduce existing care deficits (overuse, underuse and misuse) and thus improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of care. To facilitate the treatment of chronic diseases such as asthma, it is important to continuously document a patient's medical history. For this purpose, it is necessary to be able to integrate and exchange data from and between multiple different information systems. Aiming to ensure interoperability across electronic documentation systems, this paper proposes the standardization of the KBV's (National Association of Statutory Health Insurance in Germany) specification for the electronic Disease Management Program (eDMP) for bronchial asthma. Therefore, international standards like SNOMED CT, LOINC and UCUM were chosen to encode clinical information, while evaluating their suitability with the scoring system ISO/PRF TR 21564. The resulting analysis showed that most of the terms had either a complete or partial equivalent term in one of the terminology systems. Therefore, future implementations of the eDMP for bronchial asthma that utilize standard terminologies could benefit from data integration from different sources like electronic health records and reduce redundancies in data capture and storage.