An inventory of publications on electronic patient records

This study describes an analysis of 1832 papers dealing with electronic patient records, and indexed in NLM's MEDLINE. Of each retrieved publication the country of origin and the journal in which it was published was determined. Furthermore, insight into the subjects of the publication was obtained by analysing the MeSH terms by which it was indexed. Since 1990 the number of publications on electronic patient records has increased. Publications originated from 43 different countries representing all continents. However, 75% stemmed from only 4 countries. The publications appeared in 379 different journals, of which 26 journals had 10 or more publications. Of all publications, 5.3% had appeared in journals with an impact factor of at least 4.5. The topics most often dealt with were: Hospital Information Systems, Computer Communication Networks, User-Computer Interface, Confidentiality and Computer Security. No obvious trends, other than an increased interest in confidentiality and computer security, were observed.