Medical documentation and data transfer
In order to enable software-supported, institution-tailored documentation of medical care in refugee reception facilities, the documentation software “Refugee Care Manager” (RefCare) was developed in the section Health Equity Studies & Migration at the University Hospital Heidelberg as part of the PRICARE project.
RefCare offers role-based functions to support medical care and and its documention in refugee reception facilities for both medical and non-medical personnel. In the patient record, each patient contact can be documented in a standardized way and prescriptions, referrals or vaccinations can be made and documented. These medical functions are complemented by an administration module, a waiting list, a document storage and a patient-related, schedulable task list.
The software also offers the possibility to electronically exchange healthcare data between facilities for purposes of joint and follow-up treatment, with the consent of the patients, provided that they also use RefCare.
Surveillance
The basis for the institution-wide surveillance of health and healthcare in reception facilities is a consented set of indicators within the network. This includes the following topics:
- Morbidity
- Quality of care
- Care processes and
- Syndromic surveillance of infectious diseases
The indicators are calculated directly from the treatment data documented in RefCare© (integrated surveillance), thus avoiding double documentation for statistical purposes. For this purpose, the local dataset is automatically evaluated on the server of the respective facility, and the indicators are calculated anonymously (without personal reference). The calculated anonymous metrics are then exported, merged on a surveillance server, and published in an aggregated form.
For this evaluation of treatment data, we received a positive vote from the Data Protection Working Group of the Technology and Methods Platform for Networked Medical Research (TMF e.V).