When I started working, a few veterinaries used a software, kept digital medical records or even registered digital prescriptions. Instead, paper registries were everyday practice. Lost of information, inaccuracies due to unclear handwriting, or duplication of medical files were not rare episodes. Moreover, when referring patients to a specialist, the whole medical record had to be typed on an email or even letter.
Rapidly, things changed and nowadays it is unusual to find a veterinary clinic without a veterinary software no matter the scale of the business. Veterinary software allows to keep not just medical records but to send vaccination, worming treatment or any other reminder the clinic would like to send to their clients. It is possible to keep accounting or financial information? with graphs or tables that makes it easier for managers/ owners to take decision based on data and to share it with their team. The options to track stocks, check the right list at the end of the day, to sell or for internal use save human time and consequently money to the business.
Veterinary centres with an MRI scan or a digital Xray equipment can send the images to specialists anywhere in the world to interpret them. This opened the possibility for veterinaries located in remote places to have access to the best professionals in certain specialities and to provide a premium service to their customers.
The chance to share medical records for a medical consultation with other colleagues with just a click saves time, sources and reduces inaccuracies.
Technology keeps changing every day and possibilities are unimaginable
After the COVID pandemic telemedicine is a reality for veterinaries. Telemedicine is embracing patients from isolated places, saving transfer customers time, allowing disable customers to easy access for consultations for their pets.
The opportunity to have veterinary records digitalized and being able to do it interoperable opens an enormous window for the planet health. When human and veterinary health data is gathered together, rapid detection of zoonotic diseases can be made and consequently early epidemiological alerts can save lives and resources.
If we think of having not just veterinary and human health digitalized and interoperable, but also environmental health data, with information about concentration of damaging particles in air, temperature, humidity and pressure from all over the world, in real time, the one health approach could be an everyday reality. Health problems related to two or even the three components of the one health triangle appears gradually in one of the three angles and then reflects in the others, so if we were in the position of anticipating and preventing diseases, we could be saving lives, saving economic resources and increasing the quality of life of the whole planet. Examples of this mechanism are the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus pandemic, or even more recently, the COVID pandemic. Another example is the AQI (Air Quality Index): when it starts to raise, cats, dogs, pets in general and children will suffer from respiratory symptoms before adults because of the distance they are from the floor. So, crisscrossing these data would represent an excellent surveillance system.
According to Kenneth Cukier, in his Big Data TEDx video, data is no more static, stuck; instead, is fluid and dynamic. Consequently, it’s fair to say that copying, sharing and processing data is easier nowadays. And this opportunity of learning from world data is the door to a new veterinary, human and environmental health concept. Moreover, watching the drone and healthcare video offered as orientation material, I could imagine the uses of the drone for veterinary issues, from reaching wild animals staying in reserves and giving them medication in pieces of food or putting parasite products on their backs, to bringing medicines to pet’s owners living in remote areas.
Can somebody assure security and privacy for everybody in an open digital society?
Having an open digital society means a complete change for the population. It touches every aspect of people’s day to day life.
As every big change, digitalizing citizens’ lives carries out advantages and disadvantages; I believe that although there are a lot of people in the world analysing the pros and cons of this process, it is unviable to actually predict all the doors that this is opening and closing for human beings.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in 2016 and was applied in all European Union Member States in 2018, is the strongest privacy law in the world.
It recognized six bases to process personal data:
- The consent of the data subject
- A contract
- The controller’s legal obligation
- The protection of vital interests
- A task carried out in the public interest or the exercise of public authority and
- The legitimate interests of the controller or a third party
With these bases the boundaries are seated.
Moreover, in Article number 5, the GDPR takes into account the privacy principles:
- Lawfulness, appropriateness and transparency
- Usage bandage
- Data minimization
- Punctuality, the data accuracy principle
- Restriction of storage
- Integrity and confidentiality, the data security principle
Sitting on these principles, the GDPR intends to protect people and avoid them to be disturbed in anyway by others.
And going further, the GDPR in its sixth article implemented the Data Subjects rights:
- Right to be informed
- Right to rectification
- Right to erasure (the right to be forgotten)
- Right to restriction of processing
- Right to data portability
- Right to object
- Right to automated individual decision-making, including profiling
Remedies, liability, penalties and compensation are also included:
- Right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority
- Tight to an effective judicial remedy
- Liability and the right to compensation and
- Sanctions
Personally, being aware of GDPD presence made me feel we are a few steps forward, but honestly, I can’t feel my privacy and rights are completely preserved yet. In the everyday life I can see privacy breaches in both private and public environments. The justice times for applying the law are still extemporaneous and the GDPR is not as rigorously enforced as it should be. In my working life there were changes to follow the new legislation in 2018, and for that reason employees have been trained on GDPR and how to apply it into our everyday tasks. However, institutions should increase controls to assure GDPR compliance. I can see a number of veterinary clinics that do not restrict the access to their customers data to just the necessary employees. Another example I can bring up are social media veterinary accounts, showing pictures of their customers and patients not always with the necessary consent of the data subject. It can be seen that the GDPR protects people with its framework and rights. It is the most valuable tool for European citizens regarding cyber security. However, there is still a long way to go. As mentioned by James Lyne in his TEDx video abut cyber security, most laws are just national and governments don’t agree among them. He also makes reference to the risk of our family, our colleagues or friends being able to break our security, even when we do the right thing. Kenneth Cukier, on his Big Data TEDx video mentioned that we are not good at handling big data, and I would add the same concept could be extended to having an open digital society. Furthermore, he expressed in a very simple way what I think about a digital world: “digitalization is a tool, but unless we are careful it will burn us”
About myself
I would like to mention this is my first blog ever. Before starting it, I thought it was going to be something complicated and I wasn’t sure it was going to work out. Nothing further from that! I am aware of some lack of details my blog has, and I’m sure it needs to polish the endpoints, but I feel comfortable with the result and with the fact that I managed to do it.
On the other hand, reading and investigating about Digi society was very interesting. I don’t agree with specialized people exposing just the pros of digitalization. Instead, I believe if every person in this sector could bring to others both the advantages and disadvantages of this matter, we could all have more chances to guide the world to a safer and better future in a realistic way. Moreover, I consider that people’s reluctance to go digital would diminish if both sides of the coin were explained.
Personally, I had no knowledge of a lot of inventions developers are working on or even how workplaces are meant to be in the future. So, introducing myself to this context was an eye opener.