Care professional or secretary

Do you recognize this situation: your organisation is using an EHR (Electronic Health Records), HIS (Hospital Information System) or other application for registering all care related information in dossiers and forms. Based on this information your organisation reports to official institutions the amount of care offered in relation to financial transfers.

The majority of your day is consumed behind the keyboard, struggling with the application, to get all data in the right places. The dossiers need to be accessible to your clients too, and sometimes you are writing two reports for each consult, one internally, one for the client.

The reason why you chose for your profession was the beautiful aspect of working with people, and youth more specifically. You want to help them in their daily live with daily matters. You realise more and more that this view is more romantic than realistic, and you became more like a fulltime secretary, that provides care only every now and then.

Hopefully the view I am drawing here is not entirely true, but unfortunately, I hear too often signals in this direction. And have seen too many solutions in the market, coming from administrative solutions, not from health care perspectives.

Legal framework

End of 2016 we have seen a new law appear in The Netherlands addressing proper storage and processing of health care related data ('Cliëntenrechten bij elektronische verwerking van gegevens'). This law was the result of the EHR (Electronic Health Records, "EPD" in Dutch) political discussion we had during the past years.

This law guards the save exchange of health care related data, the client's right to have insight in the information stored about them, and how clients give consent to care professionals to access their data. As well as the assurance that none of the stored data will leave Europe.

Another directive covers care given to families having multitier issues ('Multiprobleemgezinnen voor jeugdhulp en jeugdbescherming'). In 2016 between 75.000 and 116.000 families are estimated to have multitier issues. This directive defines a way for multiple care professionals to work together, and to define trajectories of care given by separate professionals or organisations.

Both law and directive give sufficient reason to change the approach in software solutions to implement a proper 'one family, one plan' ('Eén gezin, één plan') approach. Sadly, today's software vendors do not offer much more than portal access to partial dossiers and in most cases reverse authorisation mechanisms, asking one client mandate to share personal data at the beginning of the care giving, without keeping track with whom the data is specifically shared.

A paradigm shift

Many guru's and visionaries have tried to introduce completely new approaches to give the client full control over their data. Many failed. The cause for failure mostly being the rigid structure of existing software and the many differences between organisations involved.

The new law and directive opens a world of possibilities, as stated clearly by Jan-Marc Verlinden of MEDrecord in a news item covering the potentials of the new law by NOS Nieuwsuur, and in his article on LinkedIn Pulse.

Our solution

The partnership between MEDrecord and Convidad envisions mobile and web application development as way forward in combination with centralised secure data storage.

By centralising the medical information in MEDrecords' secure database, the data is detained from specialised applications on/off premise of the care giving organisation. This allows the care giver to continue using their applications, while data relevant for exchange with client's and other care givers is made available through the MEDrecord database.

Each application only needs one connection to the MEDrecord database, so the impact on existing software vendor solutions are relatively small.

Around the MEDrecord database engine, API's offer secure access for application solution providers. Convidad is one of those, offering dedicated software solutions on top of MEDrecord's solution.

In this sense, each care professionals will have their own preferred software application, either on laptop, desktop or mobile devices. The application is optimised for the daily routine of the care professional, making the software truly supportive to their care related work, and not the other way around.

Other apps give clients access to the data, so they can read, modify, or annotate information as recorded by the care professional. This allows the client to correct wrong interpretation and optimise the care given.

About MEDrecord

Convidad partners with MEDrecord (www.medrecord.io) to provide specialised software solutions to care professionals, where security and careful handling of privacy sensitive data is of utmost care.

MEDrecord is a -ground-breaking- digital health platform for accessing patient data from mobile health and clinical devices, wearables and applications. With their growing ECO system of customers and partners -that includes health IT vendors, health information systems, wellness companies, providers, pharmaceutical companies and CROs- to the continuously expanding list of digital health technologies, MEDrecord enables healthcare companies to better coordinate care, improve engagement strategies and more efficiently manage their populations.