seminar
Centralizing electronic patient records - the long and patchy way in Finland
Health care remains to enjoy less than optimal support from information systems. Electronic patient records - or electronic medical records or electronic health records, how you like it – are at the hearth of information storage and processing in the field of health care. The presentation will discuss pressures that electronic patient records face in the increasingly more complicated getting health care field, and the inherent structures of the health care industry that make electronic patient records missing in agility. The complicated need to include various aspects of social and wellbeing behaviour to the personal records is also analyzed.
Finland has taken a rather distinctive and straightforward way to store electronic patient records. Over time, all information should be available from one logical database. The small population of just 5.4 million inhabitants makes this doable, but behind the goal are also other factors. To support the understanding of the current Finnish situation, some historical background is provided. Some difficulties and opposing voices persist even in this arrangement, but generally the solution based on one central database is seen as good solution for Finland. Early learning outcomes and current status of discussion in Finland’s way toward the central solution for electronic patient records are being discussed.
<p>Reima Suomi is a professor of Information Systems Science at University of Turku, and a part-time professor at Huazhong Normal University, Wuhan, Hubei, China, as well as a guest professor in Wuhan University of Business and Technology. He has been a professor at Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, Finland since 1994. He is a docent for the universities of Turku and Oulu, Finland. Years 1992-93 he spent as a “Vollamtlicher Dozent” in the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, where he led a research project on business process re-engineering. Winter semester 2013-2014 he was a visiting professor at University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and at spring 2013 a visiting researcher at University of Münster, Germany. Currently he concentrates on topics around management of networked activities, including issues such as management of telecommunication networks, electronic and mobile services, virtual organizations, telework and competitive advantage through telecommunication-based information systems. Different governance structures applied to the management of IS and are enabled by IS belong too to his research agenda, as well as application of information systems in health care. Reima Suomi has together over 500 publications, and has published in journals such as Communications of the Association for Information Systems, CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, Information & Management, Information Services & Use, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Behaviour & Information Technology, Journal of Management History, Orthopaedic Nursing and Information Resources Management Journal. He has edited books for several publishers including Springer and Routledge. For the academic year 2001-2002 he was a senior researcher “varttunut tutkija” for the Academy of Finland, and the year 2013 he was on a sabbatical made possible by the Finnish professor grant system (Professoripooli)<br /><br /></p>