Dutch National IT Institute for Healthcare: National Patient Records System Gets Boost From SOA

If you can manage your shopping and banking online, why not your health?

It used to be that motivations for improving healthcare information technology (HIT) boiled down to saving lives and dollars. Now patients want more control and convenience over the healthcare process as well – without sacrificing privacy. This is as true in the Netherlands as it is anywhere national HIT strategies have been adopted.

When the Dutch Ministry of Health got a mandate to control healthcare costs, it looked for a small-budget solution to create a countrywide electronic patient records system. The catch? The system had to be lean and flexible – able to expand rapidly to match user demand – while also protecting patient privacy.

Better care with better information

Teaming with CSC, the ministry created Landelijk SchakelPunt (LSP), or the National Switch Point. LSP pulls together records from multiple healthcare providers to create a more complete picture of past medical treatment. By cutting out manual tasks, LSP reduces errors, cuts healthcare costs and improves patient health. It’s also highly secure. Neither LSP nor the doctors’ systems store retrieved files, making breaches in privacy more difficult.

CSC used its Catalyst methodology and service-oriented architecture (SOA) to design and build LSP as a hub that connects to healthcare providers' systems using a series of standard interfaces. Physicians use their own applications — and a Java card that authenticates their identities — to access patient data retrieved by LSP from other applications. Doctors can only see information that patients have previously granted them access to in an authorization profile. In this way, LSP enables a level of accessibility usually found in centralized systems, yet achieves greater security and cost-savings through decentralization.

SOA enables rapid adoption

CSC delivered LSP on schedule in 2006, and by April 2008 at least 100 medical systems had joined the LSP pilot program. Along the way, CSC designed hardware and software upgrades and started rolling out a scaled-up LSP, able to tackle a rapidly expanding load — opening the floodgates to widespread adoption.

"LSP is crucial to establishing the safe, nationwide exchange of up-to-date healthcare information," says Anil Jadoenathmisier, director of operations for the Dutch National IT Institute for Healthcare (NICTIZ). "CSC not only delivered LSP on time, but proved to be a true partner in the further development and implementation of LSP."