Digitising clinical data: an uphill road for Switzerland

2/13/2021 4:32:28 AM

(MENAFN- Swissinfo)

A pediatrician enters the results of an examination into a patient's electronic record. © Keystone / Christian Beutler

"Have you ever tried to ask your doctor for your electronic medical record? Try it if you want to have fun." Bioinformatician Torsten Schwede thinks that Switzerland is still quite far from the goal of creating a single digital clinical data exchange system that would enable the country to transition to a more modern healthcare system.

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"In some cases, clinical data are on paper, in others they are digital. Often physicians still communicate with each other via fax. So there is still no such thing as 'your electronic medical record' where all information flows together in a structured way,' the professor says. Torsten Schwede is vice president for research at the University of Basel and head of a research group at the SIB Swiss Bioinformatics Institute. He explains that health data is often stored in different silos that are not accessible and in formats that are not intelligible by software tools.

For example, Switzerland struggled to keep track of the infections at the beginning of the pandemic, because cantons manually flagged new cases and faxed them to the federal authorities, instead of doing that digitally.

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