E–mail: it starts showing results

Although the health system is advancing very slowly compared to other industries, I'm sure that people are ready to adopt online services and that the health care system is able to open new lines of communication in accordance with the times we live in. Success is guaranteed, provided that the professionals are willing to adapt, and this is the hard part. No wonder the banking offices and travel agencies, to take two examples, have had to redefine, from head to toe, their business models, thanks to or because of online services.

In this review of a scientific evidence program (in the scanned blue cover), the Department of Veterans Affairs in the U.S. asks the following question: What is the association between 'safe' e-mail and clinical outcomes, the patients satisfaction, the treatment adherence and the efficiency or the resource use?

But first, if I may, I’ll clarify the issue of ‘safe’ e-mail because I think it is relevant. For obvious reasons of security and confidentiality, whenever we speak of using electronic messaging to communicate between a patient and their doctor or nurse, one has to do it through a protected access, which for now is the platform of shared clinical record.

Healthcare for diabetics: Is the Spanish model good enough?

Diabetes mellitus type 2 has a prevalence of 8% in the general population and 20% in over 65, and if you consider all the complications that arise, it is clear that this is a chronic disease that occurs most in everyday life of health systems. So, having the issue of diabetes well addressed is very important.

The Spanish model of primary health care included, since the beginning of its reform in the early 80s, a holistic model of diabetes care, with timely support from the endocrinologists and probably for this reason, the results recorded today are very satisfactory. See it in the OECD report of 2011, that when the rate of hospitalisations for admissions due to poorly controlled diabetes is analysed, Spain shows the lowest rate out of a group of 24 countries.

On the left side of the graph, where the accumulated data is, we can see that the admission of 3.3 per hundred thousand inhabitants and the year recorded in Spain represents half of the second country on the list, Israel, one-fifth of that of Portugal, one sixth of the U.S. and the UK, and so on, towards the worst performance in the series, which are those of Austria, with admissions of 187.9 per hundred thousand inhabitants a year.