IGR Report: Understanding and Improving the Design, Deployment and Use of Electronic Health Records Background

Background The Electronic Health Record (EHR) lies at the heart of NHS plans for integrated patient care (Jones, 2004). Building on the partners’ studies of medical record keeping practices and inter-organisational communication (Hartswood et al., 2003), methodologies for userled development (Hartswood et al., 2002), the use of paper in knowledge work (Sellen and Harper, 2001), pattern languages (Martin et al., 2001), legacy systems (Hartswood et al., 2001; Randall et al., 2001) and distributed information management (Hughes et al., 1996), this project examined fundamental assumptions surrounding the EHR, and explored strategies and tools for its design and deployment.