Richter, Simone
Demirer, Ibrahim
Choi, Kyung-Eun
Hartrampf, Johannes
Pfaff, Holger
Karbach, Ute
Funding for this research was provided by:
Innovation Fund of the Federal Joint Committee, Germany (01NVF17001)
Article History
Received: 26 February 2020
Accepted: 31 March 2020
First Online: 13 April 2020
Ethics approval and consent to participate
: On behalf of all the trial sites, the study has been approved by the Ethics Committee of both the Medical Faculty University Hospital of Cologne as well as the North Rhine Medical Association and is registered at the German clinical trials register (DRKS00014047). Before participating in the study, all participants give written consent to conduct the first and second postal survey and, in case of an invitation, to participate in the interviews or focus groups. Participants of the interviews and focus groups will be informed in advance about the procedure and the guarantee of data protection in compliance with the regulations. All participants will be informed about the possibility to drop out of the study at any time, without negative consequences and to deny answering questions. The first surveys will be pseudonymised, the second surveys will be conducted anonymously. The numerical pseudonymisation and personal identifiers will be recorded by the data protection officer of the IMVR and will only be recorded to manage the responses to the questionnaire. The operative researchers do not have access to this data. Thus, a complete anonymous data import and data analysis can be guaranteed. All information will be kept confidential, address data will not be passed on to third parties. The pre-test after the think-aloud method is carried out with every postal survey before dispatch. Claims data will be transmitted anonymously by PronovaBKK. Process data will be transmitted anonymously by the RGL.
: The manuscript does not contain any individual person’s data in any form.
: Prof. Dr. Holger Pfaff is an Associate Editor in BMC Health Services Research. Furthermore, the authors declare no conflicts of interest.