I need four attempts until I finally get sick. Do I better click fever above or below 38.5 degrees? Am I supposed to attest to a stuffy or runny nose? And what about olfaction, chills and hoarseness? A total of 22 disease symptoms I can mark with the mouse to prove my alleged cold.
The challenge: By no means every combination leads to the goal, for example high fever is not accepted. For me, it works only on the fourth attempt: I make it to the sick letter and thus the yellow glow for the employer.
What sounds like a computer game is really a business model. Since a few weeks the website AU-Schein.de is unlocked. The most tempting promise for employees: a few clicks can be used to describe a cold and get a real inability to work with the employer the next day.
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Emission inspection certificate
"Doctor follows her wish"
See the doctor or at least talk to him? Needless to say, communication is via WhatsApp. Listening to blood pressure, chest and back, looking in eyes, nose or ears, so I do not cheat? Superfluous. Twelve quick questions, a PayPal transfer of nine euros, done. The whole thing is, the operators say, legally watertight.
"For how long do you feel unable to work?", It says in the form on the website. One to three days can be ticked, then the promise follows: "Doctor follows your request. Today is day 1 and unchangeable beginning of the AU." I click on "3 days". In addition to exclude the risk factors: I am neither pregnant nor was I recently on a tropical trip. Once again "continue" - and then all the information will be sent together with my insurance number to a doctor. Of course I can not check if this is really the case.
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Screenshot: Just click on a few symptoms
Diagnosis: frightened emoji
A few hours later, anyway, I get a PDF file with the AU certificate via WhatsApp. "Dear Patient, After examining your information I diagnose a cold", it says in the accompanying text. Completely teasingly, the author - or the answering software - has added a sneaky emoji.
Signed is the findings of a "private doctor" from Lübeck - although the company that operates the portal, located in Hamburg. Anyway, the company probably cooperates with the doctor. And where it clicks through my symptoms and then freed me from work, I ultimately do not care, since I do not visit him anyway.
Only: In the directory of physicians in Schleswig-Holstein the man does not appear at all. Nor in the Lübeck phone book. And Google does show an old, stylishly renovated warehouse at the given address, in whose lofts evidently young start-ups have settled. A doctor, however, is not there right away.
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Doctor talk via WhatsApp
Doctors advise against sick leave via the Internet
Carsten Leffmann knows the Hamburger Krankschreibungs-Portal. Leffmann is medical director of the Medical Association of Schleswig-Holstein, where the Lübeck doctor is allegedly a member. "As a 'private doctor' you can settle down anytime and anywhere, but then also exclusively take care of private patients or self-payers," says Leffmann. Prerequisite: a completed medical studies, at the end of which the state has granted the license to practice medicine.
Then you may call yourself a doctor and practice medicine on humans. And since last year under new, legally not yet fully illuminated conditions: Since the remote treatment ban for doctors was relaxed. But this easing - and this is interesting for my sick leave - is not yet implemented everywhere: for example, not yet in Hamburg state law and in the medical profession of the Hanseatic city, says Leffmann.
In plain English: Hamburg doctors are currently not allowed to carry out the online sick leave. This has, says Leffmann, citing media reports, the provider of the portal "at least in the short term trying to get around that a recruited Hamburg doctor was temporarily driven to Schleswig-Holstein territory, from there to perform the resulting medical tasks."
I imagine the doctor driving out of Hamburg in a taxi, opening her laptop in a run-down café 50 meters beyond the city limits, quickly filling out a few yellow bills electronically and then getting back home. Of course, she will submit her ticket with her tax return. Pure imagination, nothing else. And for fever dreams, my symptoms are not enough.
Yellow note on "order"
The Medical Council Schleswig-Holstein in any case advised against using the offer because of the legally questionable overall situation, reports Leffmann. He had the suspicion that by clicking on the buttons with the symptoms of illness, the certificate of incapacity for work "probably rather machine-triggered" - so you could order the yellow glow so to speak.
Incidentally, according to the medical officer, medical work "moving around" anyway not allowed, "and the mere removal of a medical person on the territory" does not automatically lead to membership in the local medical association. The last note from Leffmann applies to data protection: Messenger services are repeatedly affected by data breaches, so just recommend "in the transmission of sensitive health data, great caution".
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Screenshot: Also the supplier speaks of "order" of the sick report
Who is my doctor?
Whether the Chamber knows the issuer of my AU certificate, Leffmann does not want to and can not say. But fortunately, the Lübeck has such an unusual name that I then find him pretty quickly: He trades as a doctor and naturopaths, and indeed - in Hamburg.
What he offers on his website sounds, let's say, interesting. He describes that he is concerned with a nice, direct and simple togetherness of people. That makes me sit up and listen. Maybe he'll just make it easy for me and write me sick a little longer, beyond the first three days?
I try to reach the doctor by phone. But the mobile number only rings in the void, before eventually the answering machine demands a message.
Well, then I'll just go back to work. And write this text.
