Health Functional Units Sentinel Network.A. Learning Device and Decision Support System in Health Functional Units at Portuguese Primary Health Care Level

Abstract

The recent portuguese Primary Care (PC) reform initiated in 2006, was presented as an extraordinary event and a marker of decisive times in portuguese society, by implementing a new model of primary health care services. This model is based on the principles of decentralization, self-organization, achievement of healthcare quality goals and responsabilization of self- motivated teams. There are various kinds of functional health units which creation is based on those principles - care providing units such as Family Healthcare Units (FHU) and support units. It is necessary to mobilize the scientific and technological potential of FHU to endow of intelligence this massive changing process, so that the PC network continues to be a ‘living laboratory’ and acts as a generator of knew knowledge. The WHO World Health Report 2008 has articulated the need to mobilize the production of knowledge on primary care. After been contextualized with environment variables, valid and strategic information should be used as support for knowledge generation, for decision making chain and action. The lack of information and knowledge about clinical, scientific, epidemiologic, organizacional and health management issues due to changes recently introduced with the PHC reform, leeds to a need for globalized strategies of information dissemination that could support research, enlarge epidemiological surveillance and improve health governance. It is also imperative a continued focus on innovation and the existence of a tableau de board as device of continuous monitoring and periodic update. This paper proposes a health functional units sentinel network in order to retrieve, transform and load useful healthcare data to the portuguese primary health care system. The idea of creating sentinel healthcare units pretends to act as a learning device and a decision support system in the field of health data collection, which should be capable to extract relevant data in the source-systems, transfer it to data wharehouses or datacentres, analyze it using data mining and statistical tools and report the results as useful information products back to the FHU and other stakeholders. These procedures aim to produce high quality information that would be necessary to scientific research, surveillance and management.