Digitization drive on Saba and St Eustatius
18 maart 2020 • Deventer • 1 minute read
The Windward Islands are also going paperless using our digital file for youth health care (KD+). Our colleagues travelled to the islands at the beginning of March to prepare the functional application managers and care providers for our digital child dossier.
Less human intervention
Before the implementation, paper files were still used on both islands. All information related to the children's health was thus recorded manually on a sheet of paper. In addition, all follow-up actions (think of letters of referral, making reports, submitting information to RIVM) are still manual actions. By digitizing, follow-up actions require much less manual handling. The professionals can register everything digitally and thus have all files 'always' at hand (provided they have a laptop with them). So they no longer have to dive into a filing cabinet to look for the relevant file to look something up. This also eliminates the chance of files literally 'disappearing', due to a hurricane or storm, for example. In addition, registration becomes more uniform and less error-prone. Information is then easier to find and new information can be noted more quickly, which will hopefully have the added advantage that parents and children will have a shorter wait when they visit youth health services.
Differences from the Netherlands
Along the way, Topicus discovered that it’s important to take into account differences between the situation in the Netherlands and on these islands. In the Netherlands, for example, it is common for children’s doctors to write referral letters for referral to the GP. On the islands, this is unlikely to happen in practice as the children’s doctor there is also the GP. In addition, the numbers are a lot lower. Logical too, since the islands have a combined population of 5,000 compared to the 17 million inhabitants in the Netherlands. For instance, there is only one dentist and there are only a few schools. On the two islands together, about 50 children are born each year, which results in care providers knowing each child well. By comparison; at an average Dutch institution, about five thousand children are born on an annual basis.
The future
Saba successfully went live with KD+ last Friday. Due to the rapid developments surrounding the coronavirus, going live on St Eustatius has been postponed, but we are confident that KD+ will soon also be successfully used on St Eustatius!
Would you like more information?
Visit the website of JGZ for more information or contact Marloes Roerdink
