The pilot trials start of the Personal Health Folder with 33 Primary Healthcare teams in Catalonia

Cat@Salut La Meva Salut is the web space where citizens can see their clinical information produced when they are attended in any of the SISCAT centres and published in the Shared Medical Record of Catalonia (HC3): diagnostic reports, visits to A&E, analyses, diagnostic image testing, vaccines and other data. 

This space will be able to be consulted by citizens and healthcare professionals from any place and at any time on a computer or a mobile device, to enable them to use the non-face-to-face healthcare services offered there.

What services does Cat@Salut La Meva Salut offer?

As well as clinical information, citizens can also find the current electronic prescription medication plan and access different electronic services to self-manage their own health. Furthermore, it will allow citizens to perform electronic processes securely and confidentially (such as asking for, changing or cancelling a visit to the doctor, amongst other things).

Cat@Salut La Meva Salut is intended to favour citizen participation and joint responsibility in preventing and looking after their own health, and to become a place where citizens can interact online via their computer or other mobile devices with the Health Department, its organisations and the provider entities (hospitals, primary healthcare centres, etc.), to be a continually evolving project to adopt improvements that provide citizens with information and functions to be able to look after their own health, and to become a transversal own space of personal services. 

Pilot trial to present the tool in Catalonia

For the moment, 33 Primary Healthcare teams (CAP) from all of the health regions in Catalonia are taking part in the pilot trial of Cat@Salut La Meva Salut, by providing users who ask in person with a password for access. Citizens will have three days to register in the system and to access lamevasalut.gencat.cat with a solid password. “It is a very simple process done very quickly, and users from the CAP only have to sign a consent form”, says Xavier Burjons, head of the CatSalut Citizens Attention Unit of the Girona Health Region. 

CatSalut will analyse the results in order to make all adjustments that might be necessary in the process and to spread the system to the rest of the country. “The idea is that this trial should be carried out between October and December in order to be able to make a quantitative and qualitative evaluation and to start the deployment in 2015”, Burjons assures. 

The challenge facing the health professionals working in Primary Healthcare is to make known this tool, a virtual space of great potential, by informing citizens of the existence of and the services offered by Cat@Salut La Meva Salut. A good time to do this is during the pilot trial, by explaining to users that the space will be very useful in helping them to relate to the health system.

What are the advantages of Cat@Salut for the Catalan health system?

The Cat@Salut La Meva Salut space offers citizens the chance to access their own medical information, and so reduces the existing barriers between doctors and patients. Fundació TicSalut explains this in a leaflet.

Thanks to the platforms giving access to the personal electronic medical record, patients become jointly responsible in preventing and looking after their own healthcare by having more power to control their state of health. It also allows knowledge on the patient to be transferred to other health professionals and authorised carers directly for the purpose of diagnosis or training. Anonymous data can also be used for research to the benefit of public health in Catalonia. 

Around Europe, the systems of Personal Health Folders are considered a key management tool and a method with potential to reduce future costs, which could make a great difference in the sustainability of the healthcare system. Along this work line, many regions of Europe, including Catalonia, already offer online access for citizens to their Personal Health Folders, in line with the goals of the European Commission eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020.

In late 2013, the European experts in this area gathered at the first Personal Health Record Symposium, organised in Barcelona by MWC with the support of Fundació TicSalut and GSMA in order to share experiences and to work together to establish objectives in Europe.  Certain success cases stand out such as that of Taltioni (Finland), the Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico (Tuscany, Italy) and that of Estonia, where 90% of the citizens already have digital documents in their electronic records.

Future challenges 

There are barriers on the deployment of the Personal Health Folders in Catalonia too: legal questions, the interoperability with the rest of the system and the lack of standards, and also the improvement of the user experience, as these web spaces focused on the patient also address the elderly, who are possibly digitally illiterate.

Furthermore, the greater tendencies of users to connect to the Internet via mobile devices must be borne in mind. In fact, Cat@Salut La Meva Salut is also accessible via mobile phones and in the future will be the place where citizens access mobile applications for managing their own health. “The Office of Standards and Interoperability of Fundació TicSalut is working on the certification and approval of these applications and efforts are also being made to develop new functions and contents for this space”, Dr. García Cuyàs, director of TicSalut, explains.