Valuable lessons from large-scale pilot with personal health environments

Want to know what medication you had last year, or what treatment your specialist prescribed? You can find it all in a personal health environment (PBL). Via a website or app, you have secure access to all your health data. The first large-scale pilot with PGOs is currently taking place in Eindhoven. GP Eric Martin of the Achtse Barrier GP practice is taking part. The PGO is a good development, he thinks, and the pilot is providing valuable lessons, insights and points for improvement.

Two health centers from Achste Barrier and GGZe started testing three personal health environments in February of this year with a total of more than 75 patients to experience whether PBMs do what is expected of them. After the start, the Maxima Medical Center and Catharina Hospital also joined the pilot so that patient data from specialists can also be shared in the digital environments.

All your health data in one place

"For patients, the Personal Health Environment offers the advantage of having a complete overview of all their health data in one place," explains GP Eric Martin; "regardless of which healthcare provider the data comes from. In addition, people can put their home measurements, such as blood pressure readings, in the environment, and they can transmit them digitally from the PBM to the GP practice in preparation for a consultation or digital contact.

Not every PBM is suitable for every patient

"Before it gets there, there is still some work to be done," Martin experienced during the pilot. "There are a lot of PBMs and they differ considerably from one another. During the pilot we are testing three of them. That gives us the opportunity to see which PBM is suitable for which patient. It is difficult that there are so many providers and good for patients to know which PBM they can best choose given their clinical picture. The trial shows that they could use some guidance in this regard."
 

Valuable lessons for further development

The same applies to the use of the environment, according to Martin. "As general practitioners, we spend a lot of time structuring the information we receive. The information that patients sift through from a wide variety of care providers, their conditions, additional information found by themselves and self-measurements is unstructured and lacks interpretation. What the pilot also shows is that in terms of ease of use and teething problems, there is still work to be done. These are valuable lessons that we can move forward with."

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