When did you get the first vaccine against Covid-19? Where did I put the blood test results? And the doctor’s prescription to buy that drug? It can happen to everyone to lose reports or materials that contain information that would be better to always keep at hand. To avoid unpleasant inconveniences and help doctors and nurses reconstruct the clinical history of a patient, the development of the Electronic health record 2.0 (Fse). It is a digital portal in which all information relating to the health of citizens of our country is recorded. A pioneering project in Europe which should see its complete development by 2026.
To begin with, as announced on Wednesday 12 June in a press conference by the Undersecretary for Innovation Alessio Butti and by the Undersecretary of Health Marcello Gemmatoby the end of 2024 it will be possible to use the ESF throughout the national territory for four main services: booking tests and visits, paying health tickets, consulting medical reports and also the choice or change of primary care doctor
Cutting bureaucracy
The Ministry of Health, the Department for Digital Transformation, the State-Regions Conference and the Privacy Guarantor are the protagonists of the implementation of this system which aims to be available and functioning homogeneously in all regions and can also be used by general practitioners and paediatricians of free choice. It will be enough to enter the platform (healthcare personnel through the methods provided by each region and citizens through Spid or the electronic identity card) to cConsult documents such as drug prescriptions or the number and types of allergies of any patient you authorize to view the data; or to book visits or download medical reports without having to return to the clinic.
In addition to serving especially to manage emergency situations, according to Undersecretary Butti the electronic health record will provide an important contribution to the reduction of bureaucracy in the healthcare sectormeeting the needs of doctors and nurses forced to fill out (even by hand) a large amount of documents for each patient, which risks taking time and energy away from the actual care of the patient.
Data protection
Sharing data by patients, however, is not mandatory, on the contrary. Given that all information uploaded to the ESF will be protected by privacy and will not be distributed to third parties, each of us can decide to obscure all the medical history that we prefer to keep confidential. In this sense, until June 30th it will also be possible to deny one’s consent to the inclusion, within one’s EHR, of health documents relating to clinical events prior to May 19, 2020. This consent, which would serve to increase the amount of information with which the File is equipped, fueling its functioning, can be denied via the online service “Fse – Opposition to the precedent”.
