Impact

Sundhed.dk is a peaceful revolution of communication and collaboration within the Danish healthcare sector. While most public-sector websites are about to adjust to current requirements and expectations, Sundhed.dk was developed from the outset with just this type of service and dialog in mind to enable all parties within the Danish health sector - including the patient - to communicate and collaborate via a single, shared web interface by means of a shared infrastructure, reducing total costs – exactly the opposite of the general trend within health care. Every Danish citizen has his own personal page (available upon identification), which reflects the specific situation of this particular patient. Here, the citizen can find accurate and updated health care information, e.g. view treatments and diagnoses from his own hospital patient record, book appointments with his general practitioner (GP) and send secure e-mails to health care authorities, order medication from pharmacies, monitor own drug compliance and get access to local disease management systems in out-patient clinics. Patients can also renew prescription drugs, survey shortest waiting lists for operations and quality ratings of hospitals, and register as organ donor, and register whether or not they wish to continue to receive treatment if they are critically ill and unable to communicate, and the proposed treatment cannot cure them. By giving access to own health information and supporting a pathway approach, the patient now is encouraged to participate actively in own treatment – realizing the vision of shared care. For example, Sundhed.dk allows diabetes patients and health care professionals in one region to access the diabetes management solution, which is integrated into existing Lab Systems, Hospital Information Systems and Electronic Health Records (EHR). The portal provides the 150,000 Danish healthcare professionals with a better foundation for decision-making. By giving healthcare professionals easy access to the latest patient information from most hospitals and laboratories in the country via the secure portal they get the opportunity to make quick and well-founded decisions in specific situations during treatment. In this way, the patient will experience interaction with the healthcare services as a much more coherent pathway.

Track record of sharing

The portal’s range of information and services has proved that it is possible to work across sector borders and specialist fields to present the user with a single point of entry that provides a general view and guides the user to the relevant information and the relevant services. Thus, Sundhed.dk integrates systems that are specific to the Danish health service – but other regional or national health services, or completely different sectors or industries, will be able to obtain similar benefits by making use of the experience gained from sundhed.dk of building transparency and sharing information and systems. Other organizations and communities can also benefit from Sundhed.dk’s approach of establishing agreement on a shared basis and platform so that new services/solutions developed for one region or one purpose are made in such a way that they can also be used elsewhere as organizations and workflows are adjusted to the new electronic possibilities. Recent initiatives that are in part inspired by Sundhed.dk are being planned and/or developed in Sweden, Singapore, Canada and Germany.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - The challenges of the project were to provide a patient-centric and cross-sector health care infrastructure with the capability of collaboration and sharing of highly sensitive information. It was to enable a broad general access for citizens, health care professionals and IT systems. The infrastructure had to support high availability combined with the capability of deploying new functionality and access to new information at low cost and with a minimum time to market. Lesson 2 - These challenges were met by providing an abstraction layer on top of existing platforms and applications. Through an Internet-based, service-oriented portal environment supported by a range of standard integration packages, the project has built a national common infrastructure. Lesson 3 - To optimize the actual value of Sundhed.dk now and in the future, the focus will continue to be not only on the technology itself, but also on the prerequisites for leveraging its potential – thus making it imperative to carefully align incentives, maintain and elaborate a culture of collaboration, and maintain a correct balance between central and local leadership. Lesson 4 - The biggest objection faced by the Sundhed.dk project was of an organizational nature. It was a major challenge to embed local and regional websites in a new, national brand that people could not identify with right away.