Minister Bruno Bruins (Medical Care) will gradually oblige healthcare institutions to exchange digital data with each other in an unambiguous manner. This will allow healthcare providers to have faster access to patients' medical data and allow patients to safely view and manage their own data digitally. The minister writes this today in a letter to the House of Representatives.
Minister Bruno Bruins: "If electronic data exchange in healthcare is in order, avoidable errors can be prevented and healthcare providers will have more time left for the patient. In the interest of patient safety, it is therefore important that digital becomes the new normal."
Legal Basis
General practitioners, hospitals and physical therapists often use their own language or system when exchanging data. These languages and systems must be coordinated with each other. Good and timely information exchange is necessary for good quality care. In the interest of the patient. Now, the willingness to cooperate in terms of electronic data exchange in healthcare is mainly based on voluntariness. This is not going fast enough. Minister Bruins will tackle these obstacles by working towards a legal basis for data exchange per healthcare process.
To get started right away, NICTIZ has identified ten processes with which to start digital data exchange. These are ambulance transfer, GP observation, triage referral, acute obstetrics, nurse transfer, hospital transfer, medication, image exchange, referral, youth health care and chain care for chronic conditions.
The same building blocks
Healthcare providers will make agreements to record medical data in the same way. Now, in practice, it is still too often the case that the general practitioner records the same kind of data differently than the physical therapist. For example, the abbreviation BB means upper abdomen for a doctor and upper leg for the physical therapist. Especially in the medical world, it is important that all health care providers can exchange information in the same way, in order to prevent errors and to enable fast data exchange.
Plan of approach
Digitizing data exchange in healthcare is a huge job that will take years to complete. The government has made 400 million euros available for this purpose. In addition, electronic data exchange was given an important role in the outline agreements concluded this summer. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, together with all stakeholders, including health insurers, hospitals, general practitioners and medical specialists, is therefore making a separate plan of approach for stepwise digitization of healthcare. No later than April 1, 2019, Minister Bruins will send the plan of approach to the House of Representatives.
Parliamentary letter on electronic data exchange in healthcare
Appendix 2: More and less direction
Appendix 3: What is already underway
Appendix 4: Barriers in language, technique and approach
