My health care contacts

My health care contacts is a workflow system for highly accessible and secure communication between patients and medical professionals via the Internet.

The Internet services can be used 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. The system was officially released in June 2003. The responsible authority is the Stockholm County Council.

Online services

My health care contacts can be used to:

• Make a doctor's appointment.
• Change or cancel an appointment. 
• Renew a prescription.
• Renew a certificate of illness.
• Obtain an extract from a patient record.
• Obtain medical advice from nurses and psychologists/psychiatrists.
• Change a family doctor.

Using My health care contacts, patients with rheumatic diseases are registering their current symptoms from their homes. The aim is to improve the quality of disease monitoring done by their doctors.

Higher accessibility

The system makes it possible for patients to improve the access to their primary or secondary care units in the connected regions whenever they want.

My health care contacts is also a service that responds to the increasing demands in general for e-services among citizens. My health care contacts should be seen as a complement to other ways for the patient to communicate with the health care system.

Furthermore, the system is a support tool for medical professionals helping them to change the load of their administrative work and make it more efficient.

Security for My health care contacts

Requirements:

Personal information must be handled according to legislation regarding all health care, in terms of integrity, secrecy and security, documentation and archiving.

Solutions:

• All messages are transmitted encrypted.
• Registration: social security number, password sent by registered letter – or instantly via an accepted electronic ID certificate.
• Patients are authenticated in the citizen database of social security numbers (+ names and official address).

• Medical personnel are authenticated in the County council electronic catalogue.

Workflow

1. The patient logs into the system.
2. The patient writes a message – in the patient’s database – on a form designed by medical professionals, so that the receiver will have all necessary information.
3. The message is sent encrypted to the care unit’s database.
4. The care unit is notified by an e-mail that there is a message.
5. The care unit message administrator logs into the system.
6. The message is read and distributed to the right doctor/nurse (within the firewalls).
7. The doctor/nurse writes the answer.
8. The doctor/nurse sends the answer encrypted to the patient’s database.
9. The patient is notified by an e-mail that there is a message.
10. The patient logs into the system and picks up her/his message.

Other functions

• The care unit message administrator can take a message back and send it to another doctor/nurse (if the first chosen one is on leave).
• The care unit message administrator can check that messages have been answered.
• All messages in the care unit´s server, that are answered and are more than three months old, are exported to the County council archive.