Malicious abuse of medical data by means of illegal trapping or the exportation of patient records constitutes another severe but all too common problem with regard to clinical information protection. Remains the question whether the implementation of a full-scale network of PC workstations across the health care institution constitutes an affordable option. Experts estimate the costs for a well-equipped hospital information system in a university clinic at about thirty million marks. The annual cost for a 400-bed health care facility with a staff of 450 persons and a turnover of 80 million marks per year, amounts to between 2.4 and 4 million marks every year for the mere running and update of the information processing. About three years ago, the network computer was introduced to the hospital as an alternative solution.
Installation remains expensive and the systems are still susceptible to hacker assaults.
When it comes to modern hospital data processing, the IT experts swear by network terminals or network computers as the only configurations which are economically viable and capable of meeting the strong requirements with regard to data protection and manipulation security. Some hospitals slowly begin to explore the market to invest in advanced information processing but many still continue to work with hard copy data. In Germany, no more than two dozen health care facilities have now installed one of the eight electronic patient file management and storage systems which are currently available. A lot of work still remains to be done in the medical sector to make hospitals more familiar with digitization. Data processing penetration is low and often applied at a basic, almost rudimentary level.