Swiss government pushes for digitalisation in healthcare

The House of Representatives approved the Digisanté programme on Thursday by 127 votes to 64. KEYSTONE/© KEYSTONE / GAETAN BALLY

A funding package worth almost CHF400 million ($455 million) over the next ten years intended to drive digitalisation in the healthcare sector will now go to the Senate after being voted through by the House of Representatives.

The Digisanté programme was approved by 127 votes to 64 on Thursday and the House of Representatives will be closely monitoring the project.

Only the Swiss People’s Party voted against the multi-million digitalisation programme. Head of the parliamentary group Thomas Aeschi referred to the ailing federal finances and said that the proposal should not be accepted because health expenditure must be curbed. However, this motion was not supported outside of the ring-wing party.

´It’s the eleventh hour´

Despite broad approval, there were many critical voices in the House of Representatives. “We are excellent at providing direct medical care, but we don’t make enough use of digitalisation,” said Kris Vietze, spokesperson for the lead health committee. Despite justified scepticism towards large IT projects, she said, the goal of digitalisation should not be lost sight of.

“Digitalisation is still in its infancy,” said Social Democratic Party spokesperson Sarah Wyss, adding that everyone’s efforts were needed.

“Let’s not stop digitalisation before it has started,” said Manuela Weichelt, who expressed concerns about the long implementation period for the project: “It’s the eleventh hour. I wish us all the best of health.”

Thomas Rechsteiner described Digisanté as a “remedy for catching up with digitalisation in the healthcare sector”. However, he added that there were risks and side effects and that effective controlling must be installed.

´Decisive action is necessary´

Despite all the criticism of past failures, it should be noted that the programme is addressing the right issues, said Andri Silberschmidt on behalf of the Radical-Liberals. “Digitalisation is not an easy undertaking, but it is essential,” he said, adding that so far, too little has been said about processes and automation.

Melanie Mettler said Digisanté was an important basis for the implementation of digital patient records. “We are pleased that things are now moving forward as quickly as possible,” she said, adding that waiting would only make investments in digitalisation more expensive.

Interior Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider pointed out that there was no lack of will to move forward, “but decisive action is now needed”, and without coordination between the various players in the healthcare system, it will not work.

Ambitious goals

The large-scale programme aims to improve the quality of treatment, efficiency, and transparency of the healthcare system as well as patient safety over a period of ten years. Hospitals and doctors’ surgeries have been working digitally for a long time, but with different programmes. As a result, a lot of data needs to be recorded multiple times – which can be a source of errors.

The hope is to better coordinate systems and processes in the sector. The government wants to use the money to digitalise health-related government services such as registers, reporting systems and information platforms across the board and ensure that they can communicate with other IT systems.

However, close monitoring of the programme is key for the House of Representatives, which has issued clear guidelines to the interior ministry regarding objectives, controlling and the involvement of stakeholders, and has requested annual reporting to Parliament.

Internal instead of external solutions

A motion by the House of Representative’s finance committee to compensate for the posts created within the interior ministry as part of the programme was rejected by the plenary session. A majority consisting of the Social Democratic Party, the Radical-Liberals, Greens, and the Liberal Greens came out on top with 105 votes in favour, 84 against and two abstentions.  

The claim was that the health ministry and the welfare minitry were already making their contributions to the project. The entire programme will cost CHF623 million and Parliament is to decide on a loan of CHF391.7 million.

Moreover, the majority opinion is that internal labour is cheaper than external experts, who would have to be brought in to compensate within the interior ministry. The fear is that this could lead to major delays.

Adapted from German by DeepL/kp/amva

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].