German health institutions will communicate with each other via Matrix protocol

The German health consortium gematik will internally use a new chat app based on the Matrix protocol. This allows potentially 150,000 German healthcare workers to use the encrypted chat service.

With this new app, gematik becomes one of the largest users of Matrix. It concerns a new instant message application called TI-Messenger, Matrix writes. Gematik uses the end-to-end encrypted Matrix protocol for the underlying infrastructure. In this way, German healthcare workers can safely exchange patient health data.

HBA-certified health agencies can choose their own provider that offers a TI-Messenger infrastructure. They can then host the servers themselves or outsource it to such a provider. Gematik initially expects that between ten and fifteen providers that offer TI-Messenger will become available.

Gematik is a company owned by, among others, healthcare institutions, but also the national Ministry of Health. The company is tasked with digitizing the health sector in the country. Germany passed a law last month to digitally strengthen healthcare in the country. The Digitale-Versorgung-und-Pflege-Modernisierungs-Gesetz states, among other things, which forms of care will be digitally supported from now on, but the law also contains guidelines for how data must remain well protected and how communication must proceed. It also contains the specifications required for TI-Messenger.

Gematik wants to have a first draft of the infrastructure ready on October 1, so that it is clear how the app should work in practice. The first apps that meet all the requirements are expected to go live in the second quarter of next year.