100% of mixed entities connected to the HC3

The eighth edition of the ICT and health survey included almost 300 questions and received the participation of 96% of the suppliers of health or social welfare in Catalonia. The large contribution and the number of questions allowed Fundació TicSalut once more to objectively analyse the state of the ICTs with respect to the Catalan social healthcare system, and to register their constant improvement. It is thus intended to define the State of the art of the foundation and to identify the sector tendencies.

The results of the survey (which can be consulted in detail here, or in the video attached to this bulletin) were analysed by Enric Llopis and Tino Martí, Fundació TicSalut project managers, during the presentation of the Map of Trends at the TecnoCampus Mataró-Maresme on the past 19 December.

The operation of the survey, which was created to detect "evolutions, tendencies and areas for improvement in the entities" of the health sector, is described by Enric Llopis in the video that follows. It also highlights the three general tendencies that were identified in 2014:

It is thanks to the survey that the Foundation can make out a constant evolution in the implementation of ICTs in the SISCAT centres, shown by objective data such as those referring to the EMRAM. comparison scale. This is a model which allows the healthcare centres to be classified according to the degree of implementation of the Electronic Medical Record, in which level 7 maturity represents total adoption. According to this scale, 13% of Catalan centres in 2014 were at level 6, which is 4.3% up on last year, 2.9% more than in Spain and 5.6% more than in Europe.

These data agree with those of the HC3, to which, for the first time, 100% of mixed health provider entities are connected (in other words all social healthcare entities such as hospitals or primary attention centres, except for those of pure mental health and pure social healthcare). Even more noteworthy is the increase in connected mental health entities, which has risen from 17% of the total to 73.7%, and of the social healthcare entities, rising from 39% to 77.8%. Of the connected centres, most publish or integrate content: 95.5% of the mixed, 63.2% of the mental health and 74.1% of the social healthcare.

The number of mobile healthcare devices of the SISCAT also increased, now accounting for 19% of total devices. Furthermore, professional use of laptops is allowed in 63% of centres, tablets in 37%, and smartphones in 21%. The survey for the first time also included the type of professional use given to mobile phones, which has been discovered to be above all as a tool of communication (74% of the centres authorising smartphones give them this use) and management (61%), but also as a vehicle for mobile applications, which might be of business, from third parties or those of the centre.

There has also been a highly significant increase in the medical virtual communities, and especially among patients, already discussed in the conclusions of the meeting, this type of community, created for interaction between patients, now accounts for 30.8% of all (an increase of 516% over the past year), which favours the discussion in favour of health self-management and tools such as the Electronic Medical Record.

What’s more, 44.3% of centres have cloud applications, most use being given by the pure mental health centres (55%). All of this is reflected in the fall in the use of paper in the SISCAT centres, as 43.3% of these no longer move any medical record on paper. 61% consider themselves entities working almost without paper, and 2% manage documentation entirely online. This means that 75.5% of doctors and nurses can now view the same information thanks to the HC3.

Of the conclusions that Enric Llopis drew from the survey is particularly the fact that in the future, “we will talk less and less about infrastructures and more about services”, services which will be addressed at the citizens, with whom more data will be shared and who will adopt an ever more participative role in managing their own health.

In order to synthesise all of these data the Foundation has been working on and building a synthetic indicator. This would allow "internal comparison between different territories and different organisations,” as Tino Martí explains in the video that follows, and so to detect "the current state of eHealth in Catalonia".

With respect to 2015, Jordi Martinez, Fundació TicSalut Innovation Director, noted the principal challenges: that the survey should have "the capacity to show this evolution towards ICT services", instead of talking about infrastructures; and that "the ICTs should be incorporated in this survey of the Map of Trends.

Useful links:

• ICT and health survey in Catalonia 2014.
• Results of the Map of Trends survey.