Shared Experience in 13 Local Danish EPR Projects: The Danish EPR Observatory

In 1996 a national strategy for the development of electronic patient records (EPR) for the Danish hospitals and primary care was launched. An element in the strategy was to support a number of regional EPR development projects. The EPR-Observatory has in the two recent years collected data from the regional projects, dealing with the expectations in four areas: 1) Impact on organisational issues, 2) Benefits of EPR, 3) Integration of EPR with other information systems and 4) security aspects of EPR. Among the observations an increasing teamwork and im-proved knowledge about the patient was found. What was expected, but not found, was resistance to EPR, as a result of changes in skills and power. The most obvious benefits are increased data accessibility and improved decision ma-king. The most considerable disadvantage is an enormous growth in discontent with the systems performance and the fact, that all the projects are delayed. Many different types of integration solutions are chosen, because of a lack of a common model for integration. Generally the projects find, that EPJ yields increased security, but logistical problems arise in having the systems running 24 hours 7 days a week. Economical benefits cannot be documented. This relates to the fact, that the regional projects are stand-alone projects. The ongoing growth in discontent with the EPR-systems and the fact, that all the projects are delayed must be subject to further exploration.