The Catalan Health Service has partnered with a consortium led by T-Systems and Better, to introduce Better Meds, the electronic prescribing and medication administration system.
To be implemented across 60 hospitals across Catalonia, the project has been described as the “largest ever single Better Meds project” and will see the openEHR standard based solution introduced.
One of the aims of the programme is to provide a patient and data-centric longitudinal electronic health record, and to establish a “vendor-neutral health data platform and medication management system”.
The first two hospitals, Hospital del Mar and Consorci Hospitalari de Vic, are planned to go live with the system by the end of the year.
Commenting on the programme, Dr Jordi Piera Jiménez, director of the digital health strategy office at CatSalut, said: “By providing a common health data specification, based on openEHR, managing electronic health records and other healthcare data will be much easier and more structured.
“The whole of Catalonia will benefit from the integrated and interoperable electronic prescribing and medicines administration solution, and we are very eager to see this system spread even further.”
Roko Malkoč, Better Meds business unit director, added: “Many regions lack patient-centred care and suffer from fragmented clinical data, which slows innovation. Better Meds can consolidate medication management data into a unified view, reducing the cognitive burden when reconciling information about each individual patient. We are thrilled to collaborate with T-Systems, CatSalut, and hospitals in Catalonia as we work towards our global vision of a world without medication errors.
In 2019, HTN explored a proposal for the region of Catalonia, where a “new model for health records in Catalonia, to provide a functional and technical platform that takes a longitudinal vision of the lifecycle of an individual and their contacts and journey within the health system” was outlined. Here, the region highlighted its ambition towards an open platform using openEHR standards.
