Catalonia launches the 'Health Data Sharing - Blue Button' project, allowing citizens to have a summary of their clinical history data

The Catalan Health System makes available to the citizens new digital solutions that ease access to the healthcare system and empower the user, allowing them to have their own information and improving their clinical safety

Health Data Sharing – Blue Button

The Catalan public health system is the first in the European Union to create a tool that gives users the ability to use their clinical data securely and share it with other healthcare systems or research areas.

The Blue Button is an initiative that originated in the United States in 2010 as a digital solution for war veterans to access and manage their medical records. The Catalan healthcare system incorporates this functionality into La Meva Salut, following the standards established by the European Union (EU Patient Summary), in line with the implementation guidelines certified by Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE).

The data collected and encoded as a patient summary adheres to the European Union’s specifications for all European healthcare systems, ensuring access to health information with digital portability and interoperability between healthcare systems: diagnoses, treatments, vaccines, test results, and allergies. In Catalonia, additionally, medical discharges can currently be downloaded, and in the future, the available information will be expanded.

Individuals who wish to access this data can download the documents through La Meva Salut in XML format from the “Personal Data” section.

Source: Departament de Salut