Belgacom supports the quest for innovation in the health sector

Michel De Coster, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Business Unit

Belgacom, with the help of its strong team, intends to play a crucial role in the quest for innovation in the health sector and to contribute to the realisation of the e-health strategy in our country. MyCareNet is one of the cornerstones of this strategy.

Belgacom intends to play a strategic, pragmatic or opportunistic role in the ground-swell of development that is currently passing through healthcare. From a strategic viewpoint, Belgacom believes it can contribute to the vital transformation of the healthcare sector, given strong historical links created with its main players. The group also wishes to fulfil this role in a pragmatic way because, whether in isolated and independent initiatives or in complex projects, Belgacom plays the partnership and interoperability card by intervening as an integrator of different components supplied by carefully selected partners. This pragmatism derives from two insights: Belgacom can no longer nurture the illusion that it can do everything alone and must therefore make choices in projects where it lacks expertise. Furthermore, as Belgacom is a stock-market listed company, arbitrages must also be made between opportunities in terms of feasibility or more specifically projects’ minimum profitability.
To this end the Group has established a team that focuses specifically on the sector. MyCareNet in cooperation with Siemens and Certipost, the AZ Maria Middelares, Ghent, videoconferencing solution and the Belgium HF pilot project in the congestive heart failure field are just a few practical examples of the leading role taken on by Belgacom in modernising healthcare in Belgium.

Belgacom developed the MyCareNet e-platform in cooperation with its partners Siemens and Certipost at the request of the mutual insurance companies. This is expected to improve the quality of information exchange between hospitals and insurers, for example, thus leading to lower administrative expenses. Legal documents such as invoice files can be exchanged among the organisations. Electronic protection (authentication) will be crucially important in this regard. The investments for service providers are minimal and they do not need to have in-depth IT knowledge to use MyCareNet. The cornerstone of this architecture is a web portal which centralises questions and answers and distributes them based on pre-established security rules.
Ultimately, hundreds of millions of administrative transactions carried out each year between mutual insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, home nurses and other care providers will transit through this platform, which is therefore closely linked to the federal eHealth platform.
MyCareNet is one of the cornerstones in the e-health strategy adopted by the Belgacom group, which is keen to work on new projects such as the electronic medical prescription and telemedicine.