To improve the quality of public health, which reflects the level of civilization of a nation, it is essential to prioritize the enhancement of human, financial, and instrumental resources that impact the functioning of the National Health Service. This is based on the absolute understanding that resources allocated to healthcare are a true investment in improving the quality of life for individuals.
The goal of the plan is to modernize patient care and management throughout the entire care process. To achieve this, it is necessary to increase investments in technology, processes, and digitalization.
This is the clear introduction that opens the document on New Public Health Guidelines: essentially, the conceptual summary of the upcoming three-year health policy framework by the Ministry of Health.
The emphasis is finally placed on the innovation of structures and processes, including electronic health records, artificial intelligence technology platforms, point-of-care diagnostics, and platforms for patient empowerment and public health education.
The health policy for the next three years will impact macro areas such as prevention, innovation, assessment of effectiveness and appropriateness of interventions, with particular attention to aging populations, biotechnology, advanced diagnostics, and e-Health.
The project named “Analysis of Production Factors for Resilience and Development of the National Health Service,” derived from the spending review strategies, will continue. This project aims to create a “Predictive Model” for analyzing key evolutionary trends in terms of needs, performance, human and economic resources, their interrelation, and their impact on various components of the National Health Service and Welfare system.
It is clear that precise and coherent tracking of assets and their utilization is crucial for the advancement of the Italian healthcare system. Too often, strategic assets are underutilized or poorly maintained due to understandable but detrimental emergency management burdens placed on already overburdened healthcare workers.
Additionally, activities will be initiated to develop new information flows related to territorial assistance, starting with primary care and territorial rehabilitation. The timing of some NSIS flows will be reassessed, as timely data from the National Health Information System can enable better management of emergencies related to epidemics like the current COVID-19 crisis.
Implementing data flows (starting from patient discharge forms) will require accurate information collection for automatic transmission of consistent, coherent, and reliable data, facilitated by increasingly pervasive informatization of the system.
A whole chapter of the document is dedicated to Digital Transformation in Healthcare: “As indicated in the European Commission’s communication on the digital transformation of healthcare and in the report on health status in the European Union (EU), European healthcare and care systems need reforms and innovative solutions to become more resilient, accessible, and effective in providing quality care to the population.”
Digital health has the potential to improve all indicators of population health and healthcare system performance across the board. For example, reducing surgical waitlists with an advanced model of pre-admission management and scheduling based on proper “operating room” and “bed” resource planning can be effectively managed with established solutions such as operating room management, patient monitoring, facility accessibility, and information through indoor navigation applications.
In essence, the sixty-three pages of the document seem to point in the right direction for a more modern, responsive, and efficient Italian healthcare system. If the main objectives outlined in the National Strategic Plan are truly realized, we will finally be able to look to the future with a bit more pride.
