PRICARE – Health and primary‐care sentinel surveillance in reception‐ and accommodation‐centres for asylum‐seekers in Germany
In Germany and other European countries, asylum seekers are often accommodated in remote and closed-off reception and accommodation facilities of states and municipalities. Medical care is usually provided in on-site clinics within these facilities. Due to a lack of guidelines and standards, a heterogeneous and fragmented healthcare landscape has developed. For example, documentation of healthcare is often paper-based or recorded using unstandardized practice software that is inadequate for the reception facility setting. This greatly impedes the exchange of patient information for treatment purposes, threatens the continuity of care and prevents any systematic, comparable and timely analysis of medical routine data.
Therefore, the PriCare project (“Health and primary‐care sentinel surveillance in reception‐ and accommodation‐centres for asylum‐seekers in Germany”) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Health developed a tailored digital infrastructure for medical providers in refugee reception facilities throughout Germany. The project ran from November 2016 to December 2020.
The software Refugee Care Manager (RefCare), developed within the scope of the project, enables the simple and systematic documentation of the medical treatment of asylum seekers. RefCare© also facilitates data protection-compliant exchange of patient data between medical providers. In addition, the collected healthcare data can be regularly evaluated in an anonymized manner based on an individually developed set of indicators. For the first time such data can be routinely merged and published on a supra-regional basis to monitor important health parameters (surveillance).
The research project funded by the Federal Ministry of Health has now been completed and the results of the project have been implemented in routine care.
If you have any questions, please contact:
Prof. Dr. Kayvan Bozorgmehr (MD, M.Sc.)
Section for Health Equity Studies & Migration
Department for General Practice and Health Services Research
Heidelberg University Hospital