Lessons from a child health system on opportunities and threats to quality from networked record systems

The British Child Health System has been designed and widely implemented to support equity of access to preventive child health services, using case-based integrated records. Lately, telematics has been increasingly applied to improve the timeliness of data entry. A special project has been established to monitor overall quality of the system's use and of the resultant preventive services. The telematics application has been found to be a potential threat to quality in a way which would apply to all remote networked patient-based systems. The demonstration will show the methodology and interim results.