«Digital health can be the key to addressing structural issues and preserving the universal character of our healthcare system, helping us to reduce geographical and social health gaps. In this sense, we are investing to modernize the healthcare infrastructure and I share the belief that digital transformation cannot only be technological, but must also be cultural, organisational, system-wide.” This was stated by the Minister of Health Orazio Schillaci speaking, at the University of Calabria, at the second edition of the General States of Digital Health and Digital Therapies (DTx), an opportunity for discussion and proposals promoted by the parliamentary Intergroup on Digital Health and Digital Therapies, in collaboration with the Calabrian University and with the health policy magazine Italian Health Policy Brief.
«This conference – added the minister – was organized in an appropriate venue and I am sure that digital health, digitalisation, telemedicine, artificial intelligence will produce benefits for the national health service. Digitalisation can do what happened in Italy after the war, when the motorways were built, it can make the national health service fairer, more accessible to everyone, it can reduce the distances between those who live in one region and those who live in another, between those who live in a small town and those who live in a big city. I’m thinking, for example, of teleconsultations, of televisits, I’m thinking of the most fragile, weakest people who can receive assistance without leaving home.”
«We are creating the concrete conditions to give the country a regulatory framework capable of guaranteeing access, appropriateness and reimbursement of Digital Therapies – declared MP Simona Loizzo, president of the Parliamentary Intergroup on Digital Health and Digital Therapies -. At the end of the work we will draw up a final document with operational recommendations, legislative proposals and strategic directions which will be formally transmitted to Parliament, Government and Regions. We then expect that, again in Parliament, definitive impetus will be given to Draft Law no. 1208 ‘Provisions regarding digital therapies’, of which I myself am the first signatory, a provision already established by the XII Social Affairs Commission of the Chamber which will allow our country to align itself with others already engaged on this front”. «Our parliamentary Intergroup, consistently with the commitments undertaken with its own ‘legislative pact – concluded Loizzo – will make its utmost efforts to ensure a clear regulatory framework for this important matter».