Digital Health

To ensure the integration of digital technologies into healthcare products/services (digital health), a broad discourse on their opportunities and risks is urgently needed. This includes not only the identification of ethical standards, but also the design of an appropriate legal framework. As in other areas of society, data is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare. For example, in the development of new (individual) therapy and treatment methods, big data opens up entirely new possibilities for improving medical care.

At the same time, however, risks and concerns about the handling of personal data and possible consequences for privacy are becoming apparent. Particularly in the healthcare sector, it is difficult to completely anonymize data, since personal characteristics (dispositions, behavior, etc.) often constitute the essential information and thus the principal value of the data.

An appropriate legal framework for digital health also affects intellectual property law. One example is the question of whether and to what extent treatment methods and preparations tailored to individual patients still require traditional protection under intellectual property law, or to what extent it is possible to protect developments in the field of “artificial intelligence”-based health innovation.

From a competition law perspective, one of the important issues is the question whether digital health tends to foster market power based on technical superiority or control over large data portfolios.