[The maturity model for the public health service-a tool for assessing and improving the digital maturity level of German public health agencies].

The COVID 19 crisis has highlighted the key role of the public health service (PHS), with its approximately 375 municipal health offices involved in the pandemic response. Here, in addition to a lack of human resources, the insufficient digital maturity of many public health departments posed a hurdle to effective and scalable infection reporting and contact tracing. In this article, we present the maturity model (MM) for the digitization of health offices, the development of which took place between January 2021 and February 2022 and was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Health.