CSC-Developed Web Portal Speeds Data Collection

When the Belgian ministry of health realized its medical data collection system was too slow to be effective in government, it asked CSC to develop a Web portal to collect medical data from Belgium's hospitals in an accurate, speedy and secure manner.

The impetus to develop the new portal, called Portahealth, came from the health ministry's desire to improve the processes by which it promotes quality health care. Belgium's Federal Public Service for Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment (FPS) is responsible for defining health programs, equipment, policies and budgets, all of which are based on data collected from the roughly 200 hospitals that operate in Belgium.

According to Thierry Gravet, IT manager for FPS, this information has been systematically recorded by hospitals since the 1990s, and it was transferred to FPS every six months in heterogeneous formats, including mail, fax and CD-ROM. FPS had to enter the data, analyze it for possible errors, send it to the hospitals for correction and wait for the hospitals to send the files back.

"This process was very unproductive, rather insecure and generated errors, so that the data only became usable a very long time after it was collected," says Gravet. "We could not let ourselves make decisions based on out-of-date or wrong information, so we decided to introduce a simple, secure and rapid collection system."

Changing the transfer channel

FPS wanted to keep its data warehouse, analysis and checking tools, while also implementing a standard data exchange format within the hospitals. What needed to change was the transfer channel. "We opted for an Internet portal, which was, at the same time, a secure solution and easy to implement and use, particularly because deployment and training would be reduced to a minimum within each establishment," says Gravet. "We wanted to continue working with Oracle, which already provided us with our infrastructure for database and application servers on the Sun Solaris platform, and with CSC, whose teams had helped us to implement our analysis tools, and who were familiar with our issues."

Within two months, CSC defined the architecture and performed the first technical tests required to validate it. The actual development took place over the following five months, and the application was submitted to FPS technical teams for testing. After the completion of an eight-month pilot phase involving 20 hospitals, followed by a training campaign with all hospitals, Portahealth was launched nationwide.

FPS and CSC project management teams had mobilized 30 people for the project, which was completed on schedule for an overall budget of one million euros. "Our good relationships with CSC teams and the extra help of specialists from Oracle led to very constructive discussions and enabled us to reach a very satisfactory solution, which was not as simple as it sounded since we also had to review a number of our procedures," says Gravet.

Revolutionizing organizational practices

Portahealth gathers three major functions—information submission, follow-up, and user management—to improve every step of the data collection process. FPS no longer has to assist the hospitals in IT support. Consequently, the process became clearer for the hospitals, which are now responsible for maintaining the system at their end. Hospitals appointed local administrators who were responsible for granting access rights to input, read and transfer information. Each user is recognized by the national identification system administered by FPS's IT management, ensuring the proper origin of received files. Lastly, FPS's records and analysis can be consulted directly from the portal in a follow-up module.

Although Portahealth has not been operational long, a number of benefits are already emerging. Data exchanges that once took three weeks now take three hours, according to Gravet. Users, both at the ministry and hospitals, are responding favorably to the elimination of "ceaseless" back and forth checking and re-entering of data. They can now dedicate themselves to more productive tasks like analyzing information.

Future applications

In addition to tracking data from hospitals for government use, Portahealth, once expanded, will have application throughout Belgium's healthcare field. The hospitals would like to be able to export data to their own information systems and have tools to make use of the data analyses and checks FPS carries out. The Portahealth architecture may also be reproduced for other aspects of public health, including drug certification, psychiatry, nursing and emergency services.