Strongly criticised by the Association of Doctors and Dentists (AMMD), which has decided to leave the management board of the eSanté agency, the DSP will be equipped with new functionalities in the coming months. These include e-prescription and the carnet de vaccination électronique (CVE), or electronic vaccination record.
Hervé Barge, director of the eSanté agency, explained that the electronic vaccination record, the agency’s second major pilot project, has already begun to be integrated into the DSP. “The CVE has been in the generalisation phase since March 2022. Currently, 239 doctors are participating in the deployment and 10,816 CVEs have been created, for 42,145 recorded vaccinations. With this integration, the patient will have a vaccination history and the DSP will become, even more, a coordination tool throughout the patient’s health pathway, which is the main objective of the platform,” Barge explained. He specifies that it will take 12 to 18 months for the system to be rolled out to the entire population.
12 to 18 months to deploy e-prescription
E-prescription should also be introduced. This service for dematerialising prescriptions, used by Luxembourg doctors, should make it possible to provide structured information to pharmacists and biologists by scanning a barcode, which will reduce the data entry and send the information directly to the CNS. The CNS will then be able to make reimbursements more quickly. “As this is a poli-modal development, it will later be extended to prescribing care, medical imaging, etc.,” said Barge.
The deployment of e-prescription should begin before the end of the year, and accelerate throughout 2023. “We have been delayed due to discussions with certain players who saw things differently, including certain AMMD doctors,” said the director of the eSanté agency.
It should be noted that by the end of this year, the country’s hospitals will be able to start feeding the DSP with “discharge letters.” This document contains essential medical information about a patient’s hospitalisation and the care provided during their stay.
Over one million electronic healthcare records
Regarding the AMMD’s attacks on the DSP, Barge insisted on the figures that show how well this platform is working: “The eSanté agency counts 1,018,484 shared care records, of which 687,824 are active DSPs, i.e., have at least one document. We should reach eight million documents in a few weeks. These are not just covid-19 test results, but all the medical biology and, since last year, medical imaging. There are also many ‘patient summary’ documents, which are a synthetic picture of the patient’s situation, which is important for patients with chronic diseases.”
When asked about the Digital health network (DHN) platform developed by the AMMD and described as better than the DSP by its creators, Barge said that he had long been asking the AMMD for the technical specifications of the DHN to see if it could be included in the DSP. But the request has not yet been answered.
This story was first published in French on It has been translated and edited for Delano.