EHR as a B2B Growth Market
8 Min. Read Time
85 percent of all approximately 160,000 healthcare provider facilities actively use the ePA today – seven months ago, this figure was 60 percent. Over 70 million statutory health insured individuals have a record. Logins have quadrupled to 4.5 million since May 2025. Anyone offering IT services or software
Where Demand for IT Providers is Specifically Emerging Today
DMEA 2026 in Berlin this April showed where the discussion stands: no longer on fundamental questions about the electronic patient record (ePA), but on implementation reality. Specialist conferences with titles like “Medical Practices on the Path to a Digital Ecosystem” and “Implementation Before Vision” demonstrate the shift from concept to infrastructure issues.
gematik communicated concrete future plans at DMEA: the ePA as the central platform for primary care. This isn’t just strategic communication; it’s a guideline for investment decisions on the software provider side. Anyone developing primary systems, lab IT, or digital health application (DiGA) software today is building on an infrastructure whose requirements profile gematik will gradually expand over the next few years.
For IT providers, this means three specific areas of demand:
Primary System Integration: Practice software, hospital information systems, and lab solutions must be able to read and write ePA data. This requires TI connectors, FHIR implementations, and certified interfaces. Manufacturers who still need to catch up here are under time pressure.
DiGA Integration: The DiGA regulation obliges manufacturers of digital health applications to integrate with the ePA. This creates a clear framework for contracts for consulting firms focused on health IT, which support implementation and certification.
Interoperability Projects: Lack of semantic and organizational interoperability is the most discussed problem, according to DMEA. Anyone offering or advising on standards-based integration solutions based on FHIR will find demand that will not diminish.
What Works for IT Providers and What Still Hinders Progress
The picture is mixed. Some segments clearly benefit – others face problems that cannot be solved by better market communication.
What Works
- Adoption outpaces the provider pipeline
- Clear regulatory obligations create project frameworks
- Bitmarck, IBM, and specialized TI service providers have reference projects
- eMP 2026 drives new tender rounds
What Hinders Progress
- Lack of interoperability at all four levels
- Unstable ePA modules from individual IT manufacturers
- Commissioning complexity remains high according to DKG
- Media discontinuities remain a structural problem
This is not a statement that the market isn’t working. It’s a statement about the realistically measurable bottlenecks. Providers who address these specific points will have better starting conditions than those who try to tackle the entire ePA ecosystem.
What Consultants and Software Providers Can Specifically Do
There’s a pattern that reliably works for large digitalization projects in the public-regulated sector: enter specialized, scale early. The ePA is not a project that someone wins as a general contractor. It is an ecosystem consisting of many specialized individual modules.
For consulting firms without an existing healthcare IT focus, the most pragmatic entry path is a partnership with a certified TI service provider. Gematik certifications, primary system specifications, and DiGAV compliance are hurdles that cannot be overcome by goodwill alone. However, a consulting firm with change management expertise, working alongside a certified TI partner, has a differentiated offering for clinics and practice networks struggling with commissioning complexity.
For software providers, the question is different: not whether ePA integration makes sense – it is already mandatory in many segments due to regulation, or will become so. The question is in what order to approach the integration layers and how to plan certification cycles without blocking the core product. This is an architectural and roadmap problem, not a market decision problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which IT service providers will benefit most from the ePA rollout in 2026?
Primarily providers of TI
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Cover image source: Wikimedia Commons / Gerda Schimpf (CC BY 4.0)
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