The Catalan Health Service prepares clinical information modelling with openEHR archetypes

The Catalan Health Service has just completed a collaboration project with Veratech, a Valencian technology company specialised in semantic interoperability. It has worked with the public body over the last few months to equip health professionals with the ability to represent clinical information in a structured and longitudinal format. The collaboration took the form of producing a good practice guide and holding training sessions to improve the quality and standardisation of information models created at CatSalut. 

This project will help CatSalut lay the foundations to be able to work in openEHR autonomously and apply the lessons learned to the Electronic Clinical Historyproject. In fact, the first archetypes that will be part of Catalonia’s electronic clinical history platform have already been implemented within the project. The use of open standards defines the strategy of the new electronic clinical history of Catalonia and presents an opportunity for the Catalan tech sector. 

Though this work, CatSalut has laid a solid foundation and trained professionals to be able to take the next steps. OpenEHR has already been successfully adopted by European regions such as Slovenia, Norway and Finland, the United Kingdom with Scotland and Wales at the forefront, and even the city of Moscow. By joining the electronic clinical history system, Catalonia will become the most populated European region opting for open platforms as a future solution for its health information systems model. 

Information systems used to collect patients’ data and clinical information share the need to have an architecture and a repository based on accurate and standardised clinical language. This element is key to contributing to a satisfactory experience for health professionals and the public in all their interactions with digital services in the health system, making updates and innovations in the electronic health records of the provider entities, and placing people at the centre of care through their personal health data.  

Catalonia currently has a multiplicity of health information systems that share the role of monitoring patients through the electronic clinical history. This scenario has highlighted the existence of different clinical information models, difficulties in producing agile and systemic implementation of innovations and having outdated and unergonomic technology. 

The electronic clinical history of Catalonia aims to offer a more horizontal vision, overcoming the barriers of care levels to move towards collaboration models between organisations and health professionals, establish an appropriate, shared language for information and encourage the sustainability of the health system through economies of scale. 

Source: Information Systems Area of the Catalan Health Service.