BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - Patients will soon be able to find out about the services and treatment quality of hospitals in Germany on a government online portal. This is the intention of plans for legislation by Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD), which the cabinet initiated on Wednesday. The "transparency directory" is to start in April 2024 and inform in understandable, interactive form about the offer at the respective hospital location. The law is intended to complement a planned major hospital reform with new regulations on financing, the basic features of which had been agreed upon by a majority of the federal and state governments.

Lauterbach said, "With the interactive hospital atlas, we are making the quality of hospitals more transparent and thus strengthening the individual decision of patients." Specifically, the portal will show which hospital offers which services. It will also be possible to call up data on case numbers, i.e. the treatment experience for medical services, the staffing ratio for specialists and nursing staff, and complication rates for selected procedures.

For the directory, the hospitals will have to report additional data - among other things, on nursing staff and physicians. The data will be combined with other existing data by two commissioned institutes and prepared for publication./sam/DP/mis