The new strategy, which the Government developed in collaboration with Danish Regions and the municipalities, specifies a need to speed up the implementation of electronic patient records, and to deploy telemedicine sooner and for a broader range of patient groups than currently.
Bertel Haarder, the Minister of the Interior and Health, said: "The electronic medical record is one of the things that should kick our health system into the future. It has taken a long time to develop and deploy a common system for electronic patient records. Therefore, it is part of the digital strategy that during the course of 2012, a national patient index will be established, which will constitute the future backbone to provide citizens and healthcare professionals with a comprehensive picture of the patient health information system across the entire healthcare system."
Regarding the action plan for the deployment of telemedicine, he said: "Telemedicine is one of the solutions to such challenges as the increasing number of chronic patients. It removes the need for patients to make difficult trips back and forth between the hospital and their own home, and it frees up hospital beds. I am therefore very pleased that the new action plan is to further develop the experiences already gained with telemedicine, so that we can see how to implement successful projects on a large scale."
Projects in the action plan will be implemented within the framework of a national strategy for telemedicine, which the Ministry of the Interior and Health will publish later in 2011. This strategy will set the general framework for the development of telemedicine in Denmark with a focus on consistency and quality in illness prevention and the treatment of patients.
Other eHealth initiatives in the new digitisation strategy include the development of:
- Cohesive IT tools in hospitals to make them fully digital work places
- Safe and comprehensive digital communication between the different actors in healthcare, such as general practitioners (GPs), hospital doctors and local homecare professionals
- Remote treatment of chronic patients in their own homes
Further information:
- Original news article - Ministry of the Interior and Health (in Danish)
- The new government digitisation strategy 2011-2015 - Ministry of Finance (in Danish)
- Related ePractice news article - DK: New digitisation strategy aims to make the public sector paperless by 2015
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Quelle/Source: epractice, 08.09.2011
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