Summary
Objectives
This paper presents the early history of the development of CPR in Sweden, the importance
of international cooperation and standardisation and how this cooperation has been
facilitated by IMIA, the European Union and the standards organisations. It ends with
the lessons learned after 35 years of experience put together by the Swedish Institute
for Health Services Development, SPRI, in a 5 year project initiated by the Swedish
Government and with participation of most health care providers in the country.
Methods
Starting with the first attempts to use punched cards to store and use patient information
for clinical use the author describes his troublesome and difficult road to a Computerized
Patient Record that could be used both for the work with the patient and as a tool
to follow up both the diagnostic and therapeutic processes and for clinical research.
Results
The most important results of the efforts to develop a computerized patient record
in Sweden are published in many reports, among them three SPRI reports published in
the late 1990s, and they are: Standardized information architecture, a common terminology,
rules for communication, security and safety, electronic addresses to all units and
users and an agreed upon patient and user identification.
Conclusions
The future CPR must be problem oriented, capable of only adding new information instead
of repeating already-known data and be available in real time regardless of geographic
location. It must be possible to present the information in the CPR as “views” where
the healthcare provider has stated in advance the information needed for his patients.
There can be a number of “views” for different occasions.
Keywords
History of medical informatics - history of CPR - history of IMIA - international
cooperation in health informatics
