eHealth: soon a reality!
Frank Robben, administrator general of the eHealth platform
The federal eHealth technology platform optimises the quality of healthcare and reduces administrative formalities. Technical completion is planned for 2012, but ongoing innovation will be needed to sustain the pace of development in healthcare.
Notwithstanding existing regional initiatives and databases, there was a perceptible need for a vision and strategy that would be shared by all of the players in the health sector in Belgium. The moment had come to coordinate the very numerous local and regional initiatives at national level while preserving their dynamic, in order to create a technical and semantic interoperability likely to extend the same quality and security standards to the entire country. This is the heart of the eHealth technology platform: the electronic transmural exchange of information between all of the players in the health sector with a guarantee of the protection of privacy and respect for medical confidentiality.
Technically, the eHealth platform offers two types of services: basic services, developed and made available by the eHealth platform, which can be used by the added value service provider to develop and offer a higher added value service and added value services (AVS), put at the disposal of patients and/or care providers. Validated authentic sources (VAS), fundamental databases which the eHealth calls on and for which the administrator assumes responsibility for the availability and quality of the information made available, are used for this purpose.
Basic services are offered by the eHealth platform through its own ICT infrastructure. Added value services use an existing infrastructure of virtual private networks (VPNs) deployed on the Internet, such as the Carenet infrastructure, extranets and FedMAN, where personal data is encrypted end-to-end.
The aim is to optimise the quality of healthcare and to reduce administrative formalities. Since its launch at the end of 2008, eight of the nine basic services are already operational and some authorities (Inami, Cancer Register, MyCareNet) already use the platform. ‘Completion’ is planned for 2012, but ongoing innovation of the technological infrastructure will be needed to keep up with the pace of development in healthcare.
