Medical specialists struggle to gather patient data; minister to help solve the issue

Almost all medical professionals in the Netherlands experience issues regarding the availability of patient data. De Federatie Medisch Specialisten (FMS) questioned over 1,100 specialists about this and 95 percent admitted to struggling with the issue. Almost half of the respondents have to deal with “limited data availability” daily.

“Medical specialists get stuck in IT systems that do not communicate with each other well every day. This does not just obstruct their work but also puts pressure on the patient safety,” the doctor organization warned.

The FMS pointed out that this leads to mistakes regarding medication. It can also lead to unnecessary repeats of research and treatments.

Specialists indicate that they often have to bend over backward to access data from other healthcare providers. Of those surveyed, 79 percent find that these are not made visible in a user-friendly manner. This is also clear from examples of situations submitted by doctors.

“Patient from a different hospital with the same epd (electronic patient file) comes to our intensive care with an empty status. Sharing data only works after a lot of clicking and typing over the info from PDFs,” one of the surveyed wrote.

Another reported that surgery suffered severe delays because the doctors could not receive the patient's brain scans.

"The surgical risk was estimated to be lower because previous delirium in the patient and poor response to antipsychotics were not known," was another example mentioned in the survey.

The FMS also conducted a similar survey five years ago. Board member Iris Verberk concluded that specialists are still struggling with the same issues five years later. They have no confidence in software developers to solve the issue and are now pleading for the Minister of Public Health, Fleur Agema, to get involved. They want her to “force the systems to talk to each other,” said the FMS.

The Ministry of Public Health is working hard to resolve the problems surrounding patient data, said one of Agema’s spokespeople in response to the news. “It is just not a simple and easy job.”

One of the plans is a "nationwide network," which healthcare providers can use to exchange data. "You can see this as the asphalt of a road network," Agema wrote in a letter last week. Agreements and standards are also needed for this. "And not every vehicle is allowed to drive on every piece of asphalt."