Equity, Quality and Innovation in the National Health System
The Minitry of Health and Social Policy (MHSP) has directed its actions in two areas:
- To co-operate with the regions in supporting their own initiatives.
- To promote and fine-tune the interoperability at national and international level.
The main requirements for that are:
- to unequivocally identify every citizen;
- to agree common and normalized clinical contents, functional standard and interchange utilities;
- to establish conditions for access and use clinical information.
The availability of a system of interchange of information in the NHS, with a Central Node of communications, agile and of maximum safety, is another requirement sine qua non for the development of the project. 
A common Data Base has been created for all Regional Health Cards (RHC), which provides an exclusive NHS’ code of identification for every citizen. This Database is managed both by the Regions and by the General Administration, and integrates information from all the IHC in the country, as well as relevant information from the General Treasury of Social Security (situation in social security) and from the Department of Justice (deaths). Under coordination from the MHSP, 37 scientific societies in the field of health have taken part in the analysis and proposal of common contents in the clinical reports for the whole NHS. Other societies, in the fields of Health Law and Bioethics and associations representing the Civic Society, have also collaborated in the proposal for functionalities and conditions of access and use of the information. As a consequence of this collaboration, a project of Digital Health Record in the NHS was formally agreed by consensus with the Regions in the Inter-territorial Council of 10th October, 2007. At this moment a Pilot Project has been initiated in two regions: – Balearics and Valencia-, Murcia will soon initiate. In the next months it is foreseen that other 7 regions will be incorporating this solution in some of their centres, in pilot phase. The evaluation of the pilots will be done at the end of the year and, except unforeseen difficulties, full deployment would begin in the National Health System in 2010. The Ministry of Health ans Social Politics has created a Health Intranet to service this project, allowing the interchange of information between the Regions through the Central Node of the National Health System. A System of Information Security Management, that recently has received AENOR certification ISO 27.00, has also been implemented. 
