When you are sick and you go to a hospital, the center collects your medical data and stores it to keep track of your medical history . This management has served to speed up treatment with the patient, however the fact that each hospital uses its own system makes communication with other centers difficult.
That is why various experts gathered this Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress ( MWC ) held in Barcelona and l’Hospitalet de Llobregat have asked that the digitization of the health sector adopt a unique model so that collaboration between centers is more dynamic and efficient.
“The first step is to share the data model between hospitals,” remarked Pol Pérez Sust , coordinator of the Information and Communication Technologies Area of the Health Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya .
And it is that the new Catalan digital health strategy will deploy an investment of 40 million euros to develop a new model of health information systems based on the international and open standard openEHR. “We are in a moment of despair and that leads to innovation”, said Josep Vidal Alaball , head of the Unitat d’Innovació i Recerca en Atenció Primària de la Catalunya Central of the Institut Català de la Salut.
Improve patient treatment
Emilio J. Cortegoso, who has suffered from progressive multiple sclerosis for 10 years, has pointed out that, as a patient, one of the problems he sees is that doctors are trapped in a digital bureaucracy, which can make the treatment worse. The system promoted from Catalonia will seek to solve this problem to make it easier for doctors to access patient records.
The health sector , also the Catalan, is heading towards a model that will upload our clinical data to the cloud . That, Pérez Sust has accepted, generates certain fears, since it is personal data whose management must guarantee privacy to prevent it from being exploited for illegitimate purposes. Even so, he points out that “in the next five or ten years we will adapt to that model.”
Asked if the centrality of the public management of patients’ medical information can slow down competitiveness between hospitals, Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva , executive director of the technology consultancy Open Evidence , has indicated that this model “will encourage competitiveness.”
Health innovation
The winners of the Hack the Hospital – 5G Transatlantic Lab have been presented at the MWC, an event held a month ago between Barcelona and Boston to promote innovation that improves the stay of adolescents in hospitals. This transatlantic collaboration has awarded Boost Board and Squishy , two projects that improve this treatment by using augmented reality to connect patients, on the one hand, and, on the other, a 360º camera to capture emotions and recreate situations that cannot given in hospitals.
