myHealth A National Portal for Doctors and Patients www.myhealth.gov.mt
myHealth is a public service web portal provided by the Malta Government’s Ministry for Health (MFH), through which private doctors and their patients may gain online access to parts of the medical records kept by the Maltese Government healthcare services, as well as other relevant information and services. The myHealth portal is freely accessible to persons in possession of a Maltese national electronic identity (eID). Medical records and services available to patients and their doctors from the myHealth portal include: •
Case Summaries (hospital inpatient discharge letters) issued from Maltese Government hospitals.
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Laboratory test results (haematology, biochemistry, immunology, toxicology, histology, cytology, microbiology, virology and blood bank results) for laboratory tests performed in Maltese State pathology testing facilities.
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Radiologists’ reports on medical images which amongst others include x-rays, CT scans, MRI scans, ultrasound scans performed in Government healthcare facilities including hospitals and regional health centres.
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Details of a patient’s free POYC medicine entitlement (list of medicines and other medical items) provided by the Maltese Government to persons with eligible chronic illnesses registered in the Pharmacy of Your Choice (POYC) scheme, and;
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Access to a patient’s upcoming clinic appointments at Government hospitals and regional health centres.
Medical record data is, with some exceptions, sourced daily from various specialised hospital information systems and transparently moved to myHealth with automated data extraction and transformation processes. Before becoming available to the patient, pathology test results and radiology reports must be first released by the patient’s doctor through the myHealth portal. Patients choose which doctors may access their medical records through an easy to use patient-doctor link portal facility. Eligible doctors are those registered with the Medical Council of Malta and in possession of a Maltese national identity. A doctor may accept or decline a patient request or choose to opt out of the myHealth service altogether. Patients have the option to nominate one or more representatives. These are persons authorised by the patient to access his or her medical records through myHealth. This facility is especially useful in cases of patients with impediments, the elderly or where a patient wishes to involve another person in his or her personal healthcare.
Other myHealth facilities available to doctors and patients (or patient’s representatives) include: •
A personalised profile for patients and doctors. Patients may include personal contact details (telephone and email) which may be optionally shared with their doctors. Further to this patients may specify an alternative contact person such as a next-of-kin or guardian.
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Doctors’ personal profiles may include information such as clinics attended, days and times, geographical areas served and other informative text for their patients.
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myHealth notifications. These are email or text messages advising patients and doctors when new results, reports or case summaries become available, patients’ upcoming clinic appointments and new patient-doctor link requests.
The Next Generation myHealth First launched in 2012, the myHealth service experienced a gradual yet consistent take-up by patients and doctors who increasingly recognised its contribution to continuous improvement of healthcare services and provision, especially within the Maltese private healthcare sector. In 2016 myHealth underwent a major makeover and the ‘Next Generation’ myHealth portal (myHealth NG) was launched in 2017. The myHealth NG project included the development of a new web interface using responsive web (mobile-first) technologies. This ensures a vastly improved user experience and portability across different computing devices including tablets and smart phones. Further to the visible parts of the myHealth portal, a completely new underlying technical infrastructure was implemented. This included a dedicated health services bus, based on a service oriented architecture (SOA), that exposes an application programming interface (API) designed to support the secure provision of data services to myHealth NG with the future possibility of extending these services to authorised third-party applications. An application business layer encapsulates the myHealth business logic whilst a number of middleware components handle user and application authentication, API publishing and data acquisition from remote data sources such as external applications. The myHealth NG development was a collaborative effort between MFH, the Maltese Government’s IT agency MITA and a focused group of private medical practitioners representing the ultimate beneficiaries. An incremental development approach which incorporated requirements elicitation and prototyping sessions with MFH and the user group ensured that shortcomings of the original myHealth portal were addressed and value improvements
were introduced in myHealth NG which, further to the portal’s modernisation and technology refresh, incorporated major improvements such as: •
A multi-lingual display. The myHealth NG portal is available in both English and Maltese languages. This renders it more patient-friendly.
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Patient-centric views for doctors. Portal functionality revolves around a patient selected from the doctor’s list of patients.
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A completely new view of laboratory results. This allows the patient and doctor to view results from multiple tests in a single aggregated view with sorting and filtering facilities on a number of parameters including test profiles, test items, dates and result values. This facilitates the analysis of results and supports doctors in their daily clinical decision-making processes.
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Doctors and patients can now flag individual laboratory results, medical image reports and case summaries for future reference and can easily save a patient’s medical records to a PDF document for printing or future viewing.
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A geolocation-based facility that allows a person to locate pharmacies and other healthcare facilities within the immediate vicinity using the GPS receiver installed in a user’s smart phone or other mobile device. This facility can be extended in the future to include a wider range of healthcare institutions.
The future of myHealth The challenge now facing MFH and the myHealth development team is to continue building on myHealth NG through the implementation of improved facilities and new services for which a number of candidates have already been identified: •
Access to other parts of Government managed medical records such as patients’ diabetes records, records of immunisations and history of POYC medicine dispensing, amongst others.
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Online facilities for ordering of laboratory tests and medical images from Government healthcare facilities by doctors for their patients.
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Facilities for the export of data to standard interchangeable formats to allow doctors to transfer data between myHealth and other clinical software applications, and;
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Online facilities for the statutory reporting of notifiable infectious diseases by doctors to the health authorities.
Certainly not exhaustive, we believe that this list will continue to grow and evolve with the increased realisation of myHealth NG’s potential. Should you wish to know more about myHealth please contact Dr. Hugo Agius Muscat (email: hugo.agius-muscat@gov.mt) or the myHealth team in the Ministry (myhealth@gov.mt).
www.myhealth.gov.mt