However, due to difficulties in recruiting and maintaining statutory physicians-researchers with both clinical and basic science training, creating translational research teams with clinicians and laboratory-based investigators is a viable solution.
After a period of three month, the physician sends the claims data to the German association of statutory health insurance physicians (KBV) where they are checked for comprehensiveness and plausibility.
(1) To explore empirically the extent to which early stage breast cancer patients in France, wish to be informed about their disease and treatments and (2) in view of the statutory duty of physicians to inform patients, to explore, from the patients' point of view, the type of information given by physicians and whether it meets their information needs.
Regional associations of statutory health insurance physicians take responsibility for quality improvement measures and sanctions.
Addresses were obtained from the websites of the regional associations of statutory health insurance physicians (kassenärztliche Vereinigung).
These are regionally active medical associations of palliative medicine, geriatrics and family medicine, nursing organisations, health insurance funds, self-government bodies (i.e. chamber of physicians, statutory organisation of sickness fund doctors, and patient organisations).
This can attain a trendsetting character, for example in the design of an area of expertise (e.g. specialist outpatient care according to § 116b SGB V [ 30], in conjunction with the statutory health insurance physician amending act [ 31]).
The healthcare cost domains analysed in this study amount to 87% of healthcare expenditures of the German statutory health system: physician and dentist services, psychotherapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, medication, inpatient treatment, sick-leave compensation [ 34] as well as out-of-pocket expenditures for complementary therapies.
Interested GPs were eligible for participation if they were certified as a primary care physician or equivalent and practiced as a statutory health insurance affiliated physician.
The ICD-10 system was used, because all issues managed by physicians within statutory ambulatory care have to be coded in ICD-10 and forwarded to the health insurance companies as regulated by German law in §295(1) SGB V and §44(3) of the Federal Collective Agreement within the statutory health insurance system in Germany [ 24].
While cases reported through clinical surveillance systems, such as statutory notifications or sentinel physician reporting schemes, may reflect the time course of the wave of infection, they may not provide an accurate measure of the infection rate in the population.
