Overview

Public Health Management

Public health has been defined by WHO as ‘the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts of society. Furthermore, Public health management (PHM) has been defined as ‘the optimal use of the resources of society and its health services towards the improvement of the health experience of the population.

Key issues for PHM at a national strategic policy level are:

  • vision
  • political leadership for health
  • central government policy-making approaches that support the vision and provide leadership
  • delivery mechanisms through regions, localities and communities that serve as instruments for implementation.
It is the weakness of the infrastructure through which policies become translated into action that has contributed to the failure of repeated attempts to shift the policy debate beyond a continuing bias towards a downstream agenda focused on treatment services. PHM is essentially concerned with action, and with effecting change. It is, above all, about capacity building in order to improve the chances of effective policy implementation.

Sylex Health platform is aimed at filling the missing gap by providing an infrastructure, which connects vast number of stakeholders into a collaborative network enabling each to contribute in building a better public health. In addition, Sylex Health provides valuable feedback with measurable metrics on effectiveness of implemented policies, so that national policymakers can fine-tune decisions pursuing achievement of strategic goals.

References:

  • World Health Organization (WHO)
  • Acheson 1988
  • Alderslade and Hunter 1994
Features

Clinical Practice Guidelines
A major problem in public health is an inability to crystallize good practice, however it is defined, and roll it out across populations and geographical areas.

Sylex Health offers a unique solution to define Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) in a structured form using the best practices around the world, and implementing those with healthcare providers nationwide. The process of CPG development and approval is a collaborative process involving academic researchers, medical associations, regulators, care providers from various disciplines of healthcare who jointly create the knowledge base for guiding healthcare practitioners.

Healthcare Providers Registry
National eHealth system includes registries of healthcare institutions, healthcare professionals, and registry of buildings, vehicles and equipment. Registries are configured both on a country level and care provider level. The registry of healthcare institution includes information about a provider, such as general information, the list of services, employed healthcare professionals, the number of hospital beds, equipment in use, premises and buildings and other key metrics.

Above information is used for various reporting purposes at different management and governmental levels. Apart from reporting, these metrics are used for calculating ratings of providers along with other data inputs.

Dictionary and Terminology Management
Terminology standards address terminology and other vocabularies used in various clinical contexts, allowing physicians and other health care providers to communicate with each other in predictable ways and to provide consistent results across record sets and jurisdictions. Examples include Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) and Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT). HL7 uses external terminology standards like LOINC and SNOMED CT, as well as its own terminology for HL7 v2 and v3. The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code set is a medical code set maintained by the American Medical Association through the CPT Editorial Panel. The CPT code set describes medical, surgical, and diagnostic services and is designed to communicate uniform information about medical services and procedures among physicians, coders, patients, accreditation organizations, and payers for administrative, financial, and analytical purposes. CPT coding is similar to ICD-9 and ICD-10 coding, except that it identifies the services rendered, rather than the diagnosis on the claim (ICD-10-CM was created for diagnostic coding- it took the place of Volume 3 of the ICD-9). The ICD code sets also contain procedure codes (ICD-10-PCS codes), but these are only used in the inpatient setting.

Sylex Health Dictionary and Terminology Management features enable standardized application of a selected standards and codes across the country.

Drug Registry
This feature enables linking the database national drug directory to eHealth platform, from which practitioners may prescribe medicine and drugs. This allows restricting drug prescriptions to only approved drugs within the jurisdiction. Drug register can be managed only on country level.

Document Templates Builder
Document Templates Builder allows designing flexible medical documentation by users without any coding skills. Configured documents can be instantly deployed into production and made available to respective users. Document sets are specified depending on characteristics of doctors and patients and are affected by such factors as doctor’s specialization and position, patient’s age, gender, diagnosis, vital signs and other relevant information.

Reporting and notifications
The system is supplied with predefined localized set of reports for a variety of users. External database query and data analysis solutions can be integrated for ad hoc reporting and advanced business intelligence purposes.
Users

National or Regional eHealth Operator (NEO)

NEO users are the main users of PHM features, who are responsible for maintenance of a vast volume of knowledge embedded in Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs), Business Process Automation workflows, Terminologies, Registries, Document Templates and Reports.

Healthcare providers

Healthcare providers periodically update registry information to reflect the changes in their resource levels, list of services provided and healthcare professionals.

Accredited CPG Editors

Governmental authorities, medical associations, academic and research institutions can be accredited by nationally authorized supervisor for creating and maintaining nationally approved CPGs based on the most recently available best practices.

Other Users

Healthcare providers (primary, outpatient, inpatient) and regulators utilize the knowledge in their daily operations.