Health’s digitalization in Italy
Italy’s Fascicolo Sanitario Nazionale (FSN), created in October 2012, is accessible for all Italian regions. The FSN contains personal data, health and social digital records of every citizen. The FSN allows access to these medical records, and if the patient agrees, they could give permission for their information to be seen by medical staff. Through the FSN it is possible to manage health appointments, payments to the national health system, payment exemptions, family doctor changes, prescriptions, and add medical documents coming from institutions outside the National Health System. It is also possible to see and have copies of documents and findings, COVID green pass, prescriptions and vaccination certificates among others. And FSN App is available, and through it, citizens can have access to the same information they have from any other device.
I find digital services very practical. It is no longer necessary to keep paper records or to remember to send test result copies to family doctors or specialists. I personally use digital appointment service, prescriptions, COVID green pass, and vaccination certificates.
The law D.L. 4/2022, from April 2022, reaffirms the interest of maintaining and improving the digital health system. The scope of this law is ensuring interoperability of medical records through a system which permits managing and coordinating heath information, being able to offer a global service, allowing healthcare facilities the use of certain software that does not involve public expenditure. The Health Ministry is designed as the main authority for the data gathered. The AGENAS (Agenzia Nazionale per I Servizi Sanitari Regionali), the national free public body performing a technical and operational function to government policies of health services, requests the task of identifying citizens through the national citizen registry office. With this database, AGENAS ensures the exactness and the continuous update of every patient’s records. The D.L. 4/2000 is aimed at making the FSN compliant to the GDPR, reinforcing fundamental privacy concepts.
There are pros and cons, of course!
Social and healthcare digital services are essential to develop new services, include all the population and increase equity with lower costs. Digitalization in these fields in Italy has reduced bureaucracy in everyday procedures. Electronic prescriptions save time for both doctors and patients. Patients do not have to stay in line to ask for a repeat prescription to the general practitioner and later queue up in the pharmacy: they just call their GP’s secretary and after that they can go straight to the pharmacy. Moreover, dealing with illegible prescriptions is no longer an issue do not occur anymore. Citizens can change their GP from their homes and when they do so, the new doctor can have access, if the patient gives permission, to all medical records from their computer in just a minute. No more printing, or losing documents on the way. There is no longer the need to go to the local healthcare office or calling to ask for, cancel or modify an appointment. Instead, this can be done from the comfort of the patient’s homes at any time, any day. On the other hand, Italy is the second country in the world, after Japan, with the highest rate of elderly people. The country has 168,7 senior citizens for every 100 young. This context is important given the proven reluctance of elderly people to enter the digital world. Governments should provide more help to the elderly with no digital knowledge; with this, they won’t stay out of track and will be able to enjoy the advantages digitalization brings in the day-to-day life. Not only that, when there is no system, no prescriptions can be done. There is no plan b for this situation that can represent an important inconvenient.
Is online shopping the best option for everybody and everywhere? Are we all ready for this?
We can find digital shops for every sector. I find some very good ones, but not all of them.
In my experience, when looking for accommodation is great to have Airbnb, Booking.com and Trivago, among others. They have a lot of filters for a faster, more accurate search. They show a lot of pictures and details of the surroundings. So, in a short time it is possible to compare thousands of hotels, apartments or any other kind of accommodation. This experience is much more advantageous than going to a travel agency. A similar scenario is found when looking for a flight ticket. Taking advantage of Kayak or Skyscanner as flight searchers, it is possible to compare a number of options. However, in this case, sometimes I’ve found advantages in travel agencies since they can offer different payment options, depending on the country where I am purchasing the tickets. I like Amazon very much; it is excellent to buy books. But, for clothes I don’t really enjoy any digital shop. In general, I prefer to go to local shops, have a look, sometimes there are helpful employees making suggestions I really take into consideration. Moreover, it is pleasant to touch materials and try different cut. Although most digital shops give the option of changing what we choose and buy, I prefer to visit brick and mortar stores. In addition, in my experience, prices are not always lower in amazon for example, comparing with local shops or shopping malls.
In the veterinary market, I find digital shops indispensable. At the end of every day, one of the tasks to be done is to buy medicines, pet foods, and any other input the veterinary clinic has to replenish. Very quickly we can check our suppliers’ web pages and compare availability, prices, special prices, and delivery time of everything we need to buy. Therefore, we can make good decisions, reducing costs and providing better customer service.
I can see new generations have incorporated virtuality since they were born. The challenge are adults or elderly people who are reluctant to use digital services. Not wanting or not being able to use digital options comes to a cost. Most of the banks do not give the option to operate both digitally or in person; instead, the digital mode is the only one for certain transactions. That means that not managing technology keeps people out of track. Another banking example are bank’s Apps, where a token is the only option for all banking operations, so, if a person does not use a mobile phone means they won’t have the chance of doing the transactions. Being away of digital shops ends up being a more expensive option. Pet food in digital shops is generally cheaper than in pet shops, e-books are only available on the web. Planning holidays would be more complicated and expensive not having the possibility of comparing prices, qualities and options on the internet. Every day companies try to reduce personnel and increase automatised processes in order to reduce costs. Consequently, non-digital-people are more isolated every day. More education, help, and work from different perspectives should be done as soon as possible. More efforts and resources should be focussed on this, giving every citizen the chance to be integrated, and therefore to have a more equitable society.
Sharing my own Digital Competence Test results
I could perform the Digital Competence Test. Even though I was aware of in digitalization, the graph helps me to see my digital competences in detail. Moreover, being able to see the percentages in each bar helps me to visualize the areas I would like to strengthen. I strongly recommend this test for every person who uses the internet!
Developing this blog
Developing my own blog, I felt more comfortable than I thought I would do when starting it. This is my first blog ever and I knew nothing about how to create one, but for my surprise it was a very enjoyable task.
I read with interest other blogs. I believe, reading different point of views, from partners from different countries it is a very enriching experience. Not only attractive the content itself, but the blog’s design, colours, fonts used. I could learn from every blog I read. Not only that, while searching information for producing my own blog content I deepened my knowledge about digital healthcare services trends in my own country.
To sum up, the choice of doing Digitalized Working Environment course was positive and enjoyable.