At the 17th National Congress of Health IT (Inforsalud 2014), organized by the Spanish Society of Health IT in Madrid, the National ICT and Medications Congress was held, attended by leading experts and figures from the National Health System.
Seeking to analyze the challenges to pharmacological databases, address the issue of falsification of medications and debate the rise in medical apps, the event featured Santiago Ortiz, the Head of the Services in the Information Technology Division of the Spanish Agency of Medications and Healthcare Products (AEMPS); Arturo Romero, the Director of the “SNS Electronic Health Record” Project at the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality; Carles Codina, head of the Pharmacy Service at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona; Antonio Blanes, a member of the Technical Department at the General Council of the College of Pharmacists; and Paul Bonnet, Director General at Vidal Vademecum, the European Supplier of Structured Pharmacological Information.
The event moderator, José Manuel Simarro, Head of the Information Technologies Division at the Spanish Medications Agency (AEMPS), opened the round table by asking the speakers for their thoughts on the quality of information that pharmacological regulatory bodies tend to provide.
Carles Codina explained that hospitals should have a single storage area for medications to consolidate and automate the information uploaded by professionals. “It would be desirable to have a common database for the entire State, and this desire is not just for hospitals as a whole but also all the active areas of each hospital,” he said.
Meanwhile, Arturo Romero defended the terminology chosen by the Spanish Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality (Snomed-CT), stating: “What we’re interested in is creating an excellent connection between patient’s health records and prescriptions.”
On that subject, the Director of the “SNS Electronic Health Record” project noted that the problems related to finding standard terminologies have mobilized the Spanish Ministry of Health which will provide coding for all the Autonomous Communities.
“The European countries using Snomed-CT terminology are praising its benefits and use because if we can’t standardize the terminology we will be more compatible with the United States than with our European neighbors,” he concluded.
However, liberating the terminology is not sufficient as its mass adoption by IT systems depends upon public investment to finance the development of electronic prescription software.
Mixed partnerships: are public-private partnerships necessary?
One of the key topics of the debate was the relationship between the regulatory bodies that supply pharmacological information and the private companies that structure the data to then connect them with different information systems.
It was thus a good time to ask how far private initiative can go. Simarro asked the round table two questions: Is private enterprise more competent than public programs? and How much should a national regulator intervene?
According to Paul Bonnet, there is still serious work to be done with regard to consolidating reference information. “In Spain, Snomed CT and the National Codes managed by the Spanish Medications Agency make it possible to unequivocally identify a medicine, associating it with pharmacological and administrative properties and consolidating the different autonomous and national databases and the clinical reference information into one place. Later, we must offer accessibility for the different systems that use this kind of information,” he said.
The Director of Vidal Vademecum referred to the public investment of the 18 Spanish Autonomous Communities in the healthcare sector: “Every Public Pharmacy Service has put a lot of work and money into maintaining and connecting the information within a single system: Primary Care, but they haven’t managed to provide a feed to the diverse hospital software systems that need to use medication databases to improve the quality of care.”
“The public sector must form partnerships with specialists in the private sector who have legitimacy, experience and technological training to distribute both the official information and national standards,” said Bonnet.
Medical apps and falsification of medications, what are the challenges?
Antonio Blanes spoke about mobile applications for consulting pharmacological information and commented that medical apps are not just a trend but a reality as every day over 2 million applications are downloaded. He added: “Although there is a kind of regulatory limbo, the fundamental question is whether the information offered in these apps is accessible to the user.”
To end the session, the problem of falsification of medications was addressed. Santiago Ortiz explained that the Spanish Medication Agency had been working on the Datamatrix application which identifies medications according to format and displays the Technical Specifications and the prospectus for the drugs. “This technology makes it possible, via a simple scan, to access quality information, more than just basic data, and so avoids the falsification of information,” he said.
Finally, continuing with the subject, Paul Bonnet said that the company he directs has been developing a tool that makes it possible to identify medications according to their shape and color.
