Putting technology to bad use: the case of the Spanish health care system

Here’s a story that will probably be familiar to my Spanish readers, but that might surprise people in other parts of the world.

Last week, after spending the Easter holidays with my wife and family in the northwestern region of Galicia, I stopped off at the Mondariz spa on the way back to Madrid, where we live, to give an Advanced Management Program.

My wife is a chronic sufferer of migraines, and uses a drug called Sumatriptan to combat a complaint that can be crippling. After being away for a week, and having suffered a couple of migraine attacks during that time, she had used the few tablets she had brought with her. In Madrid, using her electronic social security card, she can easily acquire Sumatriptan from any pharmacy, which would have a record of her doctor’s prescription for the drug in its database.

Let me point out here that Sumatriptan has no value on the black market and produces no psychotropic side effects. It simply helps ease the effects of migraine; so popular is it that in many cases it is even possible to purchase the drug over the counter without a prescription.

Needless to say, as we began our journey back to Madrid, and still in Galicia, my wife began to note the first symptoms of a migraine attack. She needed to take a Sumatriptan pill as soon as possible, so we went to the first pharmacy we could find.

But the pharmacist insisted on a prescription, so we handed over my wife’s social security card. To which the pharmacist said that she could not verify the information contained on it as Galicia’s health system is managed by its regional government and cannot access data held by another regional government’s health system. Her solution was to recommend visiting the A&E unit of a nearby hospital in the hope that a doctor there might write us out a prescription.

This solution was bordering on magical thinking, so rather than wasting time waiting in a hospital and then trying to persuade a doctor to make a diagnosis on the basis of our word, we simply went to another pharmacy.

As is so often the case in this life, success or failure usually depends on talking to the right person. This time, the pharmacist simply handed over the Sumatriptan without a prescription, and which I paid for happily?—?despite my wife being within her rights under Spain’s social security system to obtain the drug at a reduced price?—?and after buying a bottle of water, we were on our way.

I should point out that there are 17 autonomous regions in Spain, whose governments are all responsible for the running of their education and health care systems. The result of this disastrous decision, made more than three decades ago, is not just hassles like that my wife and I experienced, but duplication of costs, failure to take advantage of economies of scale, and the complete inability to put technology to its proper use to make life easier for people. In effect, each region is its own little country, meaning that when you go on holiday to another part of Spain from where you live, you face all sorts of inconveniences, and that is without getting into the absence of a unified data base for the different regional police forces and the country’s courts…

In the 21st century, a relatively small country like Spain, which, it has to be said, has one of the best health care systems in the world, we continue to waste taxpayers’ money on maintaining 17 separate health care information systems, one for each region, and that are not interconnected.

One of the main benefits that technology is supposed to have brought is the ability to access data from anywhere, but we have rendered that capacity null and void. Once again, Spain shows that when it comes to technology, we haven’t a clue.

(En espa?ol, aquí)