Education and training possibilities in Europe for chaining ambulatory and hospital inpatients care

Although there is a trend to the development of the electronic patient record, the need for uniform classification systems to document diagnoses and procedures is still there. In the European Union, some research projects or concerted actions promote the concept of episodes of care, meaning that the clinical status of a patient might be followed by different health professionals in various health care settings (ambulatory care, emergency, inpatient, long term care) through medical record summaries. An inventory of teaching and training tools related to information systems that classify diagnoses in various health care settings has been made during the year 1998. Its results show that casemix tools are mainly used for hospital inpatients, much less for outpatients and almost never yet to link episodes of care. Computerised training tools exist in several countries for coding as well as for grouping patients but this area appears still too knew in the field of education because of a lack of European health policy to use uniform data sets in order to measure the degree of efficiency as well as the quality of health care delivery systems in the European union country members.