Carcedo, who has inaugurated the Information Systems Day of the National Health System, explained that it is a survey promoted by the OECD, has the participation of 15 countries and will serve to "advance the integration of the patient's perspective as a center and thereby improve the quality of the National system of health".
Spain is one of the countries that have participated in this project since the beginning, together with France, Italy, Norway, United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia, among others. In 2020, the pilot survey is planned and, if it responds to methodological requirements, it is expected to have the first results on the perception that patients have in 2021.
The minister stressed that "the Ministry wants, in coordination with the Autonomous Communities, to make progress in the collection of indicators reported by the patients themselves." The aim, "measure the desired orientation of services to people, trying to know if the results they perceive in their health are consistent with those observed from the clinic or from management."
Comprehensive health approach
The minister explained that the Information System of the National Health System (SNS) should also serve so that the managers of the system adopt the best health policy decisions and that health professionals can guide their clinical practice by resorting to precise indicators.
Carcedo stressed that the data has not always been accessible or comparable between Autonomous Communities but has explained that the Information System has come to alleviate this situation: "It has been built on a strategy approved by the Interterritorial Council, with a comprehensive approach to health and with the participation and consensus of all SNS agents. "
This comprehensive approach translates into the realization of standardized measurements on the population and their sociodemographic events, their behaviors with an impact on health, the existing morbidity and mortality, the supply and demand of services, accessibility and their quality, expenditure and health outcomes, among others.
"The effort in the normalization supposes an enormous task and not sufficiently recognized because it is not seen, but it is essential to be able to assure the comparison of data", insisted the minister.
The SNS Services Node and the health intranet maintained by the Ministry, as well as the common efforts of standardization and technological interoperability, "must be recognized for their contribution to the improvement in the exchange and processing of data and information among all agents of the system".
Clinical practice, efficiency and sustainability
Working with data, obtaining them from sources, debugging them and processing them to turn them into indicators with useful meaning is precisely what the Health Information System of the SNS does every day.
In Spain, the SNS is the framework of health guarantees for all citizens and is based on the principles of universality, equity and social solidarity. "The system is financed among all depending on the economic capacity of each and provides services to each person based on their health needs," recalled the minister.
Within this framework, Carcedo insisted, the SNS Information System must allow us to know the capacity to respond to the needs of citizens in conditions of equity, quality and relevance of services; and the productivity of the resources used to achieve the best results in individual and collective health.
Currently, the Ministry offers a sanitary statistical repertoire, for public use, that provides millions of data. From those collected by population health surveys, which periodically obtain information in about 30,000 households; hospital discharges or follow-up in Primary Care of a cohort of 4.7 million people.
"This set of statistical information – he has pointed out – informs us about the diseases that we attend, the clinical practice that is carried out and the results in terms of what is defined in the scientific field, as 'good control' of health problems" . To this is added "the information that allows the analysis of the data within the framework of available resources, which is essential for the analysis of efficiency and sustainability".
The Information System also offers tools, such as Sanitary Barometer, which allow to take the pulse of the public opinion on the public health system and collect some of their expectations.
It also offers a selected set of Key Indicators of the SNS which provides, in an integrated and systematic manner, essential information about the health system; periodic SNS and short-term reports; and the National Health System Data Bank, which offers free download of the data. "Our goal is always to get all the possible performance to the data we have available and for that, we have to continue working under the umbrella of Interterritorial Council, in tune with the national statistical authority and without losing sight of the initiatives of international organizations. "