The Hague, February 6th, 2018
PRESS RELEASE
The Hague – To effectively cooperate in healthcare, patients and care providers need to be able to exchange patient data. Due to the large variety in healthcare systems this exchange has been difficult in the past. The Reinier Haga Group has set out to overcome these difficulties with the use of Zorgplatform. This innovative system enables them to exchange patient data easily, safely and in a controlled manner.
The Reinier Haga Group (consisting of the Reinier de Graaf hospital in Delft, HagaZiekenhuis in The Hague and LangeLand hospital in Zoetermeer) is the first to use Zorgplatform, through which they are able to achieve an easy, safe and controlled exchange of patient data between their EHR systems and eHealth solutions like the FocusCura app.
The introduction of Zorgplatform has also been another incentive for the Dutch government to further promote cooperation in healthcare by actively developing (soon to be mandatory) IT standards. Today, Secretary-General Erik Gerritsen was informed about Zorgplatform during a working visit.
"Of great importance"
"We at the Reinier Haga Group want to provide the right care, in the right place, at the right time for our patients. Therefore it is necessary to arrange our care around the patient as much as possible, resulting in a patient who can increasingly be in charge of his own care process. The use of an app that measures vital values such as blood pressure, weight or heart rhythm from home fits in with our care objective. In addition, the overall availability of a patient record is of great importance to our physicians and nurses," explains IT manager Marcel Slingerland. "Patient data no longer originates from just our own hospital but from other healthcare organizations and innovative apps patients can use at home. Zorgplatform facilitates the integrations to exchange all this data."
Exchange via standards
A common request from doctors and nurses is an all-encompassing record of the patient. This is often difficult to achieve as information is stored in too many different systems. "Zorgplatform was developed to accommodate this request in a safe and easy way," says Remko Nienhuis of ChipSoft. "Zorgplatform exchanges information with the hospital's EHR system in a standardised manner. This is done through Health Care Information Building Blocks (ZIBs) defined by the government. This allows the hospital's EHR to link with other patient records, but also with other care innovations."
E-health apps
FocusCura's app cVitals is the first app to be connected to Zorgplatform. A medical specialist can prescribe 'cVitals homebased measurements' directly from the EHR and analyse its measured data and alarms set of by abnormalities. They can also contact patients via video calls.
Cardiologist Jan Willem Borleffs of the HagaHart Center at HagaZiekenhuis shares his experience on working with FocusCura's app cVitals: "Last year we started our project CardioThuis. This showed us the impact that homebased measurements and video calling can have on patients with heart failure. They felt safer and we were able to intervene sooner to prevent hospitalization." Mr. van der Hoeven, a patient at HagaZiekenhuis can confirm: "This new form of contact increases supervision, which works very well for me."
A requirement for connecting more patients is the integration of homebased measurements into the EHR system called HiX (software by ChipSoft) so doctors don't require an additional system. Dr. Borleffs: "I am pleased that, thanks to Zorgplatform, we are able to make all data available centrally in the EHR. This is an important step in the recognition of eHealth."
By linking the homebased measurement functionality to Zorgplatform, other care institutions that join in also have access to the data. With Zorgplatform, the Netherlands has created an innovative system of sharing patient data between patients and hospitals.