Exchanging medical data is also a must for psychiatric centres
Bernard Lambrey, ICT Manager at the OLVrouw van Vrede Menen Psychiatric Centre

Bernard Lambrey and his colleagues from OLVrouw van Vrede Menen Psychiatric Centre consider it particularly positive that the Health Innovation Forum is exclusively aimed at the health sector.

“This day gave us an illuminating insight into the new possibilities and innovations in healthcare. We are already quite advanced with our psychiatric centre. Thus we have been using the electronic patient file (EPF) since 1995. We have a section of WLAN; after today we have ideas on how we can develop this further. We find it particularly positive that this seminar is specifically aimed at the healthcare sector.”

“In theory eHealth is a wonderful initiative: a centre where all of the players in healthcare can share information securely. However, it was also the intention to start exchanging all information in the future at the time when the EPF was introduced, but it takes longer in practice to get everything on the rails. Before it reaches that point, you need a base of common information that can be exchanged. That is not the case for psychiatry for the time being, even though cooperation between psychiatric hospitals in West Flanders is closely-knit. But we are fully confident that everything will be settled over time, certainly with a dynamic person like Frank Robben at the helm.”

“In our view, the only bottleneck in modernising healthcare is the lack of subsidies: we are obliged to start up all types of electronic projects, but we do not have the resources for these. There is still work waiting to be done here by policymakers.”