As part of the health law, the Vaucluse GHT is in the process of standardizing its IS across the ten institutions that make it up. To get started, it was first necessary to identify and gather users within an Azure Active Directory, which then laid the foundations for the digital convergence of the GHT and the territorial patient file.
🗣️ Michaël De Block, Director of Information Systems for the Vaucluse GHT
Renaud Dumont, information systems planner for the Vaucluse GHT
What was the great challenge of the Vaucluse GHT?
Michaël De Block. The Groupement hospitalier de territoire du Vaucluse is ten hospitals in a territory of 3,500 km² and a population of 560,000 inhabitants. It is a group of establishments that until now had different information systems and that, within the framework of the health law, must work to have the same information system. This is digital convergence.
Digital convergence is illustrated in particular by what we call the territorial patient file. This is a single, multi-institutional software program that allows us to work in each of our hospitals, but also to share data to support the care pathway.
What were your problems and what solution did you adopt?
Michaël De Block. Digital convergence is particularly complicated, especially in terms of what we call user management. User management is different in every hospital, and we needed a system to harmonize a common directory for the entire GHT so that we could connect to the software, and in particular to the computerized patient file.
What has the deployment of the CIO changed for your users?
Michaël De Block. The work of health care personnel is facilitated, particularly with regard to mobility. With the lack of staff, nurses and doctors are increasingly asked to work in other establishments. So having the same tool is more practical in terms of training, in terms of the digital environment. And above all, the most important thing for these professionals and the patients they care for is that they will be able to find all the patient's stays in all the hospitals in the region. This saves time, because medical staff have easier access to information: hospitalization reports, imaging results, in short, everything that makes up a computerized patient record.
This also means savings for the community, since if laboratory tests have been ordered at the Cavaillon hospital, for example, when the patient arrives at the Avignon hospital, they will not be repeated.
How was the support Blue Soft Empower ?
Renaud Dumont. We were fortunate to be supported by Blue Soft Empower on this subject. Empower has thus acted as a link between the support establishment in Avignon and the ten establishments in our GHT, with local support for the various local IT departments so that we can all have minimum rules of use for convergence.
The big advantage of working with Empower is that there is a real proximity between the experts and the people who carry out the operations, a dialogue without interference.
We are able to quickly address all the small problems that can occur on an IT site. We solve them, even when we find ourselves in what seems to be a dead end. We quickly find a plan B and we always manage to get out of it thanks to the agility and flexibility of our staff Empower.
How to summarize the success story of the Vaucluse GHT?
MDB. The success story of the GHT was first of all the ability to federate energies and skills at the level of what we call the territorial IT service. Then, it was to ask the right questions in terms of facilitating this digital convergence, and in particular with this GHT holder and this territorial Active Directory.
Then, based on these technical foundations, we gradually deployed this regional electronic patient record based on the skills of computer specialists, but above all of the professional referents, doctors, nurses, midwives, social workers, etc.: all those who have accompanied us for the past two years and who allow us to be very proud to talk about this digital convergence. We are very proud to be able to talk about this digital convergence.
What are your next projects?
MDB. The next projects are still about digital convergence, but in areas other than the computerized patient record. These include anesthesia, chemotherapy, computer-assisted material management and PMSI, which is our hospital billing system.
The various software applications that we are setting up have the same secure connection needs around a GHT Active Directory. We are therefore going to rely on the technical foundation that we have put in place with Blue Soft Empower and Microsoft, and we will gradually expand it according to the needs of these different software programs.
The perspectives linked to the implementation of so many tools is to produce health data, and today this health data is very much expected at the national level, in a project called Mon Espace Santé, which is the virtual health booklet of the patient that will follow him or her, not only on a territory such as a GHT, but also on a national scale.
The challenges of the health sector for 2023
MDB. Today, there is an increasing lack of personnel in hospitals, hence the need for mobility in the territory, hence the need for digital technology.
The government is supporting us with a major project called the Digital Segur.
This Ségur Numérique involves various developments, including the famous digital convergence, but also IS security. All the tools we deploy must be protected as far as possible from attacks, and in the event of an attack, still enable us to restart. In this respect too, Empower is helping us to move forward, but above all to continue to enable us to supply the famous secure data exchange tools such as the DMP and secure healthcare messaging.
