Agence eSanté, Luxembourg’s national eHealth competence centre, one of EHTEL’s longstanding members, is about to reach yet another of its roadmap’s milestones. The 2012-2021 time-period has included many major milestones for the country. Several more landmark achievements are in store from 2022 onwards.
2021’s launch of a new eHealth service
2021’s activity involved the national roll-out of the Carnet de Vaccination Electronique (CVE), the electronic vaccination record. The roll-out follows on from the successful pilot phase initiated in April 2021, in which some 30 volunteer healthcare professionals took part.
Starting in December 2021, the CVE will be successively rolled out amongst paediatricians, general practitioners, gynaecologists, occupational physicians, and eventually all other remaining vaccine providers.
The launch of this new eHealth service brings added value to healthcare providers, patients, and public health services. It provides an online and thus easily accessible up-to-date view of a patient’s immunisation status. Thanks to the automated registration of administered vaccines, it takes away the administrative burden from healthcare providers and enables the automatic generation of notification messages for vaccinations that are due. Furthermore, because the CVE platform is managed centrally on a national level, it gives the country’s public health services an accurate view of the immunisation coverage and facilitates vaccine management on a national level.
A decade of achievements
The CVE is just one of the eHealth services Agence eSanté has put in place since its establishment in 2012.
In 2014 was launched the first, major eHealth tool, the eSanté platform: the cornerstone for all eHealth services that followed later. This national common interoperability platform covers two major components that are indispensable for the identification and authentication of eSanté services’ users, and for the secure and data protection compliant sharing of healthcare data: the Master Patient Index and the Healthcare Provider Directory. The eSanté platform is the central national eSanté services’ entry point. All the information systems used by independent and institutional healthcare providers connect to it.
2015 saw the achievement of a second major milestone of Luxembourg’s national eHealth roadmap: the pilot launch of the Dossier de Soins Partagé (DSP), a patient’s electronic health record. Initially foreseen to last for one or two years, the pilot phase ended only in 2019 due to the lack of a national law that enabled the general roll-out to all persons affiliated to Luxembourg’s social security. When this law came into force on January 1st, 2020, it kick-started the DSP’s general roll-out. Despite the challenging COVID-19 situation, it was completed by the end of December 2020.
Over time, both the number of DSPs and documents has evolved substantially. DSPs and their accompanying documents have increased 15-fold. At the pilot phase’s close, in total 59,138 DSPs had been created containing altogether some 314,281 documents. Meanwhile, the number of DSPs has grown to more than 930,000, with over 4.7 million documents. The accompanying use of the DSP will be furthered increased, once artificial intelligence tools allow active use of the DSP’s data for preventive and predictive purposes, as well as for personalised healthcare.
Immediate, next steps
Encouraged by this positive development, Agence eSanté’s team continues steadily its activities on the other eSanté services in store. The next milestone to reach is the roll-out of electronic prescriptions, both on a national level and in the context of the cross-border electronic exchange pursued by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)-funded European project MyHealth@EU.
