Success stories

Discover some success stories where health data standards have helped to secure safety and quality of care.

Big data for the early identification of other diseases associated with cancer National Portal for Digital Exchange of COVID-19 Patient Data in The Netherlands Shared Medication Treatment Plan – Geneva, Switzerland Health Optimum for care institute connection through telemedicine – Veneto, Italy One national IT-system for large-scale COVID-19 testing in the Netherlands

‘Big Data’ was used for the early identification of other diseases associated with cancer.

There were 17 million new cases of cancer worldwide in 2018 and that number continues to rise. Cancer has a huge impact on patients. It is also a major burden for health care systems across the world. Patients with cancer may be at a higher risk of also developing other diseases. If clinicians knew which other diseases have the highest risk of occurring in patients with each type of cancer, they could prioritise trying to detect that disease early or, if possible, prevent it from occurring.

Research was undertaken to improve medical and research understanding of which additional diseases are most likely to occur in patients with cancer. The work focused on patients with the nine most commonly occurring cancers. The aim was to develop a way of helping clinicians and researchers in the future to discover which other diseases might be associated with cancer in the same patient over time.

After analysing the data, a computer program was set up to detect diseases occurring in any patient within three years of each other, and to display these disease associations in ways that would help a scientist to determine the strongest disease connections. This collection of disease associations was used to create a visual image that can be rotated or zoomed to enable very detailed inspection. This system is called the Cancer Associations Map Animation (CAMA).

This systems helps clinicians to become aware of other diseases that their cancer patient might be at risk from and early detect or prevent this from occurring.

Scientific research paper (published Jan. 2016)

An online portal allows Dutch hospitals to seamlessly share COVID-19 patient information with one another. The portal was developed by Philips in cooperation with Erasmus Medical Center (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), Jeroen Bosch Hospital (‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands), and the Netherlands Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS). In the fight against an escalating pandemic like COVID-19, being able to share patient data between hospitals at the “touch of a button” is vital to optimizing the use of healthcare resources. For example, it can assist in the seamless transfer of infected patients between hospitals to avoid local overload in critical care units. Since its launch on 28 March 2020, 95 percent of Dutch hospitals have already been connected to the portal for digital exchange of COVID-19 patient data. The new COVID-19 portal, which is available to all Dutch hospitals, is not linked directly to an individual hospital’s EPD (electronic patient dossier), PACS (picture archiving and communication system), or pathology department system. Instead, specific information, such as a patient’s radiology images, reports, and patient summary, is shared via the portal. The information is instantly available to a receiving hospital, provided that the originating hospital and the patient have given their explicit consent.

The safety of medical data exchange remains of the utmost importance, even in times of crisis. As a result, the portal fully complies with the ISO27001 information security standard and the Dutch NEN7510 standard, which is specifically designed for information handling in the healthcare sector. “In this time of crisis, Philips is offering a solution for sharing patient data between hospitals quickly and securely,” said Simon Vermeer, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the Erasmus Medical Center. “Sharing patient data needs to be done in a secure way, and the current solution is often to send a USB stick or DVD. I am extremely proud that we were able to implement this portal together with the government, Jeroen Bosch Hospital, and Philips in this short term to support care for patients with COVID-19. I would also like to express my gratitude to the teams at all the organizations that have worked hard on this.” Philips Interoperability Solutions built the new COVID-19 portal on top of its existing XDS cloud document sharing service, which allows patient data to be sent digitally in a secure manner.

Further reading on the IHE website

The Canton of Geneva (Switzerland) built an Electronic Patient Record system aiming at regrouping all important documents for the patient’s care (go live: Q4, 2017). Documents are provided by all stakeholders. The patient is the owner of the patient record. An added-value service exists for 3 years now enabling care providers to manage the medication treatment plan. The goal is to have a complete view of all medications taken by the patient. The ongoing project is to link stakeholders’ applications (prescription systems, dispensing systems, home care systems) directly with the core system in order to avoid any duplication of data entry and to have a true integration of all primary systems with the central shared medication treatment plan tool.

Further reading on the IHE website

HEALTHcare delivery OPTIMisation through teleMedicine (HEALTH OPTIMUM) connects 34 community hospitals in the Veneto Region of Italy to seven specialty centers for neurosurgery. Managing more than 2,300 telecounselling requests each year, this system allows three of every four patients to be treated closer to home with the support of family and friends rather than being transferred to a remote tertiary medical center.

The HEALTH OPTIMUM network has dramatically reduced the economic, organisational and social costs related to patient transfers while significantly increasing the quality and continuity of care assistance across the region. Sixty percent of cases today can be closed within the first hour and users recently rated their satisfaction with the system as 4.3 out of a possible 5.

Info published in April 2011

Further reading on the IHE website

As of 1 June 2020, all people in the Netherlands with mild symptoms of COVID-19 could get tested. The potential was initially estimated at 30,000 tests per day, with a possible increase to 70,000 tests per day in the fall of 2020 (*), an unprecedented challenge the 25 regional centers for public health were confronted with.

A major issue was to allocate the country’s available testing capacity, dispersed over some 60 labs, to the places where it was most needed. Connecting the 25 regional solutions with 60 different labs across the country was out of the question.

The regional centers for public health therefore chose to develop one national solution for COVID-19 diagnostics, called CoronIT, and connect the labs to this unique system.

As HL7 is a well-established family of standards used in labs across the Netherlands, using HL7 Version 2.5 messaging, lab ordering and results reporting proved an efficient way to enable information exchange between the laboratory information management systems and CoronIT.

In the course of four months, 50 of the 60 accredited labs were connected and ready for the fight against COVID-19, thanks to the dedicated community of expertise around IHE/HL7 lab information exchange.

(*) UPDATE after publication of the article: The testing reached an all-time high of nearly 90,000 tests per day in March 2021, with a total capacity of 100,000 in place. All through the same infrastructure.

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