Aim and objectives:
There is an urgent need to break down industry silos and increase collaboration to drive progress towards a patient-centric and cost-effective model. Denmark has been at the forefront of many IT initiatives within health services. The majority of these initiatives are based on a common infrastructure. The Danish National eHealth Portal, known as sundhed.dk ("sundhed" means "health") helps to promote the optimisation of the Danish healthcare sector.
Target group:
Sundhed.dk is a public, Internet-based portal that collects and distributes healthcare information among citizens and healthcare professionals.
All Danish citizens have access to Sundhed.dk, enabling patients to communicate, and patients and their families to get an overview of correct and updated healthcare information, making the services appear close-by, open and familiar. Every citizen has his/her own personal page (available upon identification), which reflects the specific situation of this particular person.
Method:
Sundhed.dk is a partnership established between all public health authorities in Denmark. The platform builds on a role-based and personalised, customizable portal environment. The portal provides information to a large range of user groups: physicians, GPs, pharmacists, dentists, chronically sick, frequent users, occasional users, etc. Every user group has its own special requirements with regard to the information it needs and how it is presented. To handle all these user groups, almost 100 different applications are needed and updated every three months.
Outcomes:
Sundhed.dk has transformed the Danish health service from consisting of information islands of independent, individual solutions and databases, each with its own limited group of users, into a structure that is based on the joint use of standard solutions and sharing of data. In helping every user who logs on to the portal via personal identification, the portal has been built in such a way that it adapts the presentation to its user needs, integrating the several channels of technological information into one.
Added value:
The portals range of information and services has proved that it is possible to work across sector borders and specialist fields to present the user with a single point of entry that provides a general view and guides the user to the relevant information and the relevant services. Thus, Sundhed.dk integrates systems that are specific to the Danish health service but other regional or national health services, or completely different sectors or industries, will be able to obtain similar benefits by making use of the experience gained from sundhed.dk of building transparency and sharing information and systems.
