eConsulta for specialized assistance

The client's problem

The pandemic has highlighted the need to have a mechanism for non-face-to-face patient care; although this possibility already existed for family physician care through the La Meva Salut (LMS) portal, there is also a desire to extend this possibility to visits with specialist physicians in the public system (cardiologists, oncologists, etc.).

The client's objectives

To allow citizens to communicate with their specialist, both to ask questions and to send them reports or obtain them from their physician. This tool, integrated into the citizen's portal, La Meva Salut (LMS), should allow for more agile communication with the specialist, and at the same time help to reduce waiting lists, without forgetting that the risk of contagion is minimized.

Main challenge

The ecosystem of the Catalan public health system (SISCAT) is very complex, with different entities and levels of integration with central systems. For this reason, the integration aspect of the messaging from the LMS with each of the entities had to be designed taking into account all the requirements to be met and the diversity of the interlocutors to be connected.

Solution

The application developed, consists of an architecture based on Angular, J2EE and Openshift containers, which is integrated into LMS transparently to the user, and allows asynchronous communication between the patient and his/her specialist doctor, as well as the sending of attachments and images. 

This architecture is compatible with the architectural guidelines of the HES project (Electronic Health Record), which the Department of Health is carrying out for the renewal of the "core" platform of the Catalan Health System. 

For interoperability with the different health entities, the IS3 platform was used, which is the platform that allows interaction between the different CAPs and the specialized care entities.