Interestingly these four articles appeared, almost together, in the last week or so.
Sweden launches national e-health strategy
03 Apr 2008
The Swedish government has launched a new citizen-centred national e-health strategy designed around ensuring the provision of information to where it is needed to support improvements in care.
The new e-health strategy focuses on the need to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to achieve improvements for patients, health professionals and decision-makers.
Setting out the future strategy for e-health in the country, the government says it will use appropriate ICT-based tools to “help to ensure that all patients receive adequate, safe, secure health care and good-quality service”.
E-health will be used to ensure care professionals can devote more time to patients and adapt care provision to individual needs. “ICT will be used as a strategic tool at all levels in the care sector, and health care resources as a whole will be utilised more efficiently and effectively,” says the strategy
More is found here:
http://ehealtheurope.net/news/3617/sweden_launches_national_e-health_strategy
The full 36 page document is available.
National Strategy for eHealth - Sweden
This is really a model document on how a national strategy should be presented and made available for all stakeholders
Next we have
Sweden chooses InterSystems for NPO
25 Mar 2008
The Swedish National Patient Overview (NPO) has chosen to use InterSystems HealthShare software, in a five year contract worth SEK 115m (€12.2m).
The software will be installed by Swedish supplier TietoEnator and should be ready for production within 12 months.
The NPO is designed to enable regional and local care providers, in both the public and private sectors, to share patient information.
Within the next nine months, it should be ready for piloting within the Örebro County Council and municipality.
InterSystem’s director of healthcare business development, Phil Birchall, told E-Health Europe: “HealthShare provides a platform for connected healthcare, where patients can build their own virtual ecosystem to look after their own healthcare. It has been successfully used in the US and Brazil for regional care, used to aggregate and share clinical data across multiple organisations, and we look forward to seeing this on a national scale in Sweden.”
HealthShare allows the creation of a summary views, showing a patient’s medical record on a national basis for the NPO. Patients and clinicians will be able to share information on the web-based system wherever they are, so long as they are authorised to do so.
“The national patient overview provides a modern tool to make co-operation between the county councils, local authorities and other healthcare providers even more efficient. One particular point of interest is that individual citizens will eventually have access to their own medical records via the internet,” said Jan B. Andersson, responsible for the Scandinavian healthcare business in TietoEnator.
More here:
http://www.ehealtheurope.net/news/3582/sweden_chooses_intersystems_for_npo
Links
And
Finland awards national patient archive contract
26 Mar 2008
The Social Insurance Institution of Finland (KELA) has selected EMC to build a new centralised national patient record archive to securely store over 5m health records in what will become Finland’s largest database.
The project aims to deliver an electronic prescription service later this year, followed by the completion of a comprehensive patient record and image archive in 2009.
The new ‘KanTa’ archiving system, valued at approximately €20m, will serve as many as 300,000 professionals within the Finnish public healthcare and pharmacies, as well as private medical clinics. KanTa will store the records of 5.3m citizens.
The national KanTa system will provide all the 5.3m Finnish citizens with access to information concerning their personal medical information. Citizens will be able to ensure the protection of their personal data by limiting the type of data displayed on their medical profiles.
“By streamlining the information management processes of the entire healthcare sector, the system is predicted to improve clinical productivity while generating major financial savings,” an EMC spokesperson told E-Health Europe.
“The centralised KanTa record archive, complete with the ‘citizen view’ option, is the first of its kind in the world. Together with the electronic prescription service, the feature will provide a new level of patient security further enabling patient information confidentiality. Coupled with the sheer data volume the system stores and operates, it will quickly become the largest database in Finland,” they added.
More here:
http://www.ehealtheurope.net/news/3589/finland_awards_national_patient_archive_contract
Links
Social Insurance Institution of Finland
Fourth
Study praises Norwegian EPRs
01 Apr 2008
A study by researchers at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has found that GP electronic patient records in Norway has led to better availability of records, but unsatisfactory access to information.
The study by academics Tom Christensen and Anders Grimsmo says that the deployment of EPRs to GPs across the country has been successful, but problems still need tackling.
In a research paper for the BioMed Central Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal, the academics say: "Although GPs are generally satisfied with their EPRs systems, there are still unmet needs and functionality to be covered. It is urgent to find methods that can make a better representation of information in large patient records as well as prevent EPRs from contributing to increased administrative workload of physicians."
Christensen and Grimsmo researched attitudes towards the EPR systems through focus groups, observations of primary care encounters and a questionnaire survey sent to GPs.
More here:
http://www.ehealtheurope.net/news/3607/study_praises_norwegian_eprs
Three things struck me about these articles.
First how cheap it is to achieve national record accessibility once the core information is being captured at the practice and hospital level.
Second how pragmatically, incrementally and rationally the Nordic countries are moving forward. If only the same was able to be achieved in OZ!
Third how clear and understandable a National E-Health Strategy can be!
Great stuff in my view.
David.
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