Viewing your own medical data online in a personal health environment and sharing them with whomever you want, or linking them to apps. Minister Bruno Bruins (Medical Care) wants this to be possible for all hospital patients. He also requires hospitals and clinics to digitally exchange data with each other to save time, prevent medical errors and prevent patients from having to tell their stories over and over again. To regulate this, Bruins will come up with a bill this year. Hospitals and clinics will receive 75 million euros to meet the legal obligation quickly, so that they can make medical data available to patients.
Minister Bruno Bruins: "With this 75 million subsidy, I want to make it possible for patients to be in control of their own medical data. Moreover, with digital data exchange, avoidable errors can be prevented and doctors will have more time because they do not have to retype data. I find it unthinkable that, in a time when we can facetime each other around the world, we are still sending faxes in healthcare. Digital must become the new normal. And as soon as possible!"
Bruins wants the data exchange to be secure. The personal health environment with which hospitals and other medical specialty care organizations will share data must therefore meet the security requirements of the MedMij agreement system. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport is having ICT specialists check whether the data exchange between institutions is actually done digitally.
Says the Netherlands Association of Hospitals (NVZ), "We are proud that with this arrangement we are jointly building on the acceleration of exchange with the patient and between specialist medical care institutions."
The national Patient and Professional Information Exchange Acceleration Program (VIPP) is helping to make healthcare ready for digital data exchange of medical data. The cabinet has made a total of 400 million available, of which 75 million in subsidies are now going to institutions for medical specialist care. The Dutch Hospitals Association (NVZ), the Dutch Federation of University Medical Centers (NFU) and the Independent Clinics Netherlands (ZKN) are implementing the program.
This article can also be found in the Privacy in Healthcare file
