We support the medical aid project match4healthcare in the area of cyber security and data protection. One of the initiators tells us in an interview what the project is about and where the challenges lie.
Andreas, what is match4healthcare about?
The Corona pandemic is posing major challenges to governments and health systems in many countries. Hospitals and doctors’ practices are facing various shortages: On the one hand, there is a lack of urgently needed equipment such as protective masks and clothing, respirators and disinfectants. On the other hand, there is a lack of medical staff. Many are absent due to illness or family obligations, while at the same time the sheer number of patients overburdens the health system’s capacities in terms of personnel.
With match4healthcare, we want to create a Germany- and Austria-wide platform that links institutions in the health care systems in need of help with auxiliary staff who have previous medical experience. In this way, we hope to contribute to overcoming the Corona crisis in Germany and Austria.
What are the special challenges for you to start such a project in times of Corona?
Of course, we are all working on the match4healthcare project from our home offices at the moment. At the same time, some of us still had to work in the hospital in parallel due to a clinical traineeship or their practical year. Nevertheless, we are very happy to have a technically very skilled and talented development team, as well as committed members from the medical/content side in our initiative. This allowed us to work constructively together as a team on new features and networking with actors in the health system.
It became problematic due to the different regulations in Germany and Austria, both in jurisdiction and in the health system. Other important topics were data protection and legal liability. Since we did not have any experts in the team for this, we ultimately only came to partners who supported our project and helped us in these matters through contacts and personal enquiries. One of these partners was Perseus.
How has the response been so far?
We have received only positive and very supportive feedback so far, both from official and private sources. The Federal Ministry of Health has linked us to zusammengegencorona.de and the Federal President has publicly mentioned our project. That helps, of course. But we have also received a lot of voluntary support from committed employees in companies and, of course, from students who want to join us.
What are the next milestones you want to achieve?
First of all, we want to found an association for the platform in order to create a legal structure for the initiative. With this, we also want to establish fixed areas of responsibility, structures and accountabilities internally. Once the technical solution has been completed, we want to take the project itself outside of Germany and Austria through contacts within the student unions of the other European countries. The vision would be a central, Europe-wide platform for networking health institutions and helpers in the Corona Crisis. Of course, we are also open to other regions of the world, but so far we lack the necessary contacts there to establish such a platform there.
Andreas Kind was born in 1997 in Wermelskirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia. After a brief detour into the start-up and media world, he began studying medicine in Berlin in 2016. In addition to his studies, he is involved in the student council initiative of the medical students at the Charité.