PNT innovation evolves access to healthcare

Revolutionizing Italy’s Healthcare with a National Platform

Italy is betting big on the future of healthcare with the National Telemedicine Platform (La Piattaforma Nazionale di Telemedicina or “PNT”), a strategic initiative backed by nearly €230 million in funding from Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan. 

This ambitious project aims to revolutionize healthcare delivery by creating a nationwide infrastructure for telemedicine services, ensuring equitable access, improved service quality, and data-driven insights for all citizens. AGENAS, the agency of the Ministry of Health, has entrusted the design, implementation and management of the platform to the project company PNT Italia, which is 60% owned by Engineering and 40% owned by Almaviva.

Improving Healthcare by Bridging a National Information Gap

The National Telemedicine Platform (PNT) has as its primary objective the governance and monitoring of Telemedicine processes. By linking with the specific digital ecosystems of each region (the Regional Telemedicine Infrastructures), PNT enhances the investments already in place or planned for the future. PNT also enables the streamlining and homogenization of nomenclatures, taxonomies, and coding at the national level, fostering greater integration among regional health services and improving the quality and access to care for people throughout the country, in line with the goals indicated by the PNRR in Digital Health.

The Platform has been built ensuring a strong focus on integration and interoperability, maintaining a distinct independence, scalability and ease of integration with the current and future digital ecosystems both regional and national involved, and offers maximum interoperability with the central systems deployed at the national level, planned for the process of digital transition of services delivered by the Public Administration.

In order to do so, it was necessary to build a completely new system from scratch, tackling cybersecurity, data quality, and interoperability, all while racing against an aggressive seven-month deadline to be operational by the end of November 2023.

Proactive Prevention Measures with Data Management and Analytics

To achieve this ambitious vision, PNT selected Cloudera as a core technology partner, and decided to deploy on Amazon Web Services (AWS)     . They also enlisted the help of Cloudera’s Professional Services team to get the platform deployed efficiently. The collaboration was a success and Italy had a new national telemedicine platform in under a year. 

Now, with Cloudera on AWS, and an open data lake architecture, the Italian telemedicine platform can easily ingest data from 20 regional telemedicine infrastructures while adhering to strict privacy regulations. This cloud-based data lakehouse architecture leverages Cloudera’s data platform and services, running on AWS infrastructure and storage, including Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. 

Data collection is optimized with Cloudera DataFlow and other capabilities within the platform, ensuring secure transfers. The platform also offers a wide range of capabilities for machine learning, analytics, visualization and future use cases. 

Governance and monitoring are foundational for The National Telemedicine Platform, ensuring interoperability and standardization across regions. With Cloudera, the organization ensures thematic data security and sovereignty: the platform enables proactive prevention measures, alongside rapid response to potential breaches.

Transforming Data into Valuable Trusted Insights

The National Telemedicine platform successfully launched in an aggressive seven-month timeframe. Powered by Cloudera on AWS, the platform is now collecting and analyzing data from telemedicine services across Italy, providing invaluable insights. 

The first characteristics of the National Telemedicine Platform include:

• Uniform and homogeneous user experience

• Standardization and homogeneity of nomenclatures, taxonomies, and coding (business glossary)

• Neutrality with respect to interoperating telemedicine systems

• Data collection, processing, analysis, and propagation (persistence management), thanks to the technologies provided by Cloudera

• Verification process of telemedicine platforms (TEM)

Importantly, the platform also delivers new insights by combining data across regions. By using the platform to anonymize and analyze datasets from different regions, the organization can more easily run comparisons and benchmarks, generating new insights in customized formats. 

This enables more detailed KPIs for different stakeholders, and means they can answer more questions, supporting informed decision-making at both regional and national levels.

The National Telemedicine system is a strategic project, laying the foundation for future innovations. The platform is also serving as a testbed for the Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico (FSE) 2.0, the national electronic health record system, paving the way for greater interoperability and contributing to the broader European eHealth landscape.