The Gaspar Casal Foundation (FGC) has in its DNA the concern for data analysis, essential to shed light on the diagnosis of the health situation of the population and our health system, which will then lead you to correctly focus the prescribed therapies . . In health policy and management it is vital to inform and advise decision makers. Since 2000 until today we have exploited the health statistics of the INE and the Statistical Portal of the Ministry of Health, publishing analyzes that allow us to monitor the performance of the Spanish National Health System (SNSE), with the leadership of Alicia Coduras. From this experiential journey, some assertions are made:
- It is essential to have updated data from the health sector and the social sphere to improve management and allow the performance of health, care and well-being systems to be evaluated.. The digitization and centralization of public and private information in reference to key health indicators in Spain should be accelerated, homogenized and made accessible so that it would be available, at most, in reference to the year prior to the current year. The pandemic has made it more evident, if possible, how necessary it is to make progress in this section so that researchers can work with recent data and so that the international sources that publish them and compare them with those from other countries can carry out this work.
- The Spanish population continues to age. Regarding the socioeconomic configuration of the health system user’s environment, the data show how the Spanish population has continued to increase, but with the lowest birth rate we have had in our history. Current living conditions, the strain of the health system, economic uncertainty and hot topics such as climate, gender and the like, do not encourage young people to form families with more than one or two children.
- Disparate behavior of health status indicators that require special attention to obesity and overweight, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and mental health problems.. We must return again to situate the importance of mental health in terms of improving the general health of the population. An important review and planning of the necessary resources is required, since part of the morbidity and mortality in other pathologies may also depend on their improvement.
- We already have an in-depth and far-sighted evaluation of a pandemic that has excessively strained a health system that has shown its resilience.. During the pandemic, professionals were overwhelmed both by the COVID-19 pandemic and by continuing to care for patients with other pathologies. The recommendation is to learn from the experience and the decisions made, and not abandon the changes that have worked, such as streamlining the management systems of primary care teams and hospital clinical services.
- Information systems must show the value of the health system for the health of individuals and populations. with open data for informative and prescriptive use by decision-makers, managers, clinicians, patients, researchers and entrepreneurs. They must be easily accessible and the databases must have a homogeneous taxonomy in the different Autonomous Communities. Ideally the breakdown of the system should reach the sanitary zone.
- Digital literacy. The development of the Internet and the digital society has changed the way we relate, communicate and carry out our social, work, economic and cultural activities, constituting an authentic revolution and an inexhaustible source of opportunities for progress. But it also entails certain risks that affect trust in the digital world and that pose a challenge to security, privacy, social cohesion in the face of digital divides, labor and civil guarantees, protection against harassment or violation of rights. Risks that require measures that guarantee the rights and freedoms of citizens, promoting a free, open and inclusive digital society. The practices to guarantee this safeguard have been encompassed in a concept: media literacy, which is the object of attention by the UNESCO through a special unit and the European Union, which has been encouraging initiatives in this regard for years. The upcoming presentation by the Government of a Charter of Digital Rights for Spain is an opportunity to review these concepts within the framework of a non-exclusive debate.
Finally, it is essential that Spanish healthcare has a high-level dashboard with real-time updates of a large part of the performance and resource consumption indicators and that it is structured based on the “Triple goal” of the health system, which implies not neglecting the regular monitoring of the experience of care for patients, caregivers and citizens, as well as the well-being and experience of health professionals.
he Health Map with Perspective (MSP), recently edited by the FGC with the support of Organon, brings together these contributions and offers us an interactive tool for free access to data from official sources, with the generation of visualizations simple enough to be able to understand the data shown, which it discovers and shares. . Information related to differentiated morbidity and mortality in women and men. Compares aggregated data from the provincial to the regional and national levels. You can cross-reference morbidity and mortality data with data on income, employment, inequality, birth rates or public health spending, comparing differences and inequalities in health, all in a friendly and kind way. The consultation offer has been differentiated into the “Morbidity, Mortality, Indicators, Comparison and Data Download” sections, strengthened by the “References” section, from where the data that nourishes and enriches it is extracted.
The management of this comparison also allows obtaining the results with a wide variety of editions of the information, including maps and graphs, which can be said to produce that competitive advantage in relation to other databases related to health and healthcare organizations. The FGC continuously monitors the quality evaluation of the information obtained through the MSP tool. For individual administration, tutorials have been provided in video format that directly and briefly facilitate its use.
This individual use is carried out in an intuitive and agile way, with a quick loading of requested results in each of its sections. In future editions we want to standardize rates and relate the MPS with the social determinants of health or the impact of the environment on our level of health.
MSP is a powerful tool that directly and always from the vision of promoting health and its management with perspective, relates our level of health and quality of life in this era of digital dominance. Its main objective is to be useful to the academic and research field, innovator, manager, professional and, also for the citizen-user-patient, to serve to reflect on correct health care with perspective. We encourage you to browse the MSP and we will appreciate it if you send us criticism of the tool to keep it alive, improving its attributes, from the user’s perspective.
