The Danish EPR Observatory. Assessing organisational impact from EPR implementation

The EPR Observatory has studied 13 local Danish electronic patient record (EPR) projects through 2 years. The focus has been on expectations and experiences in relation to organisational changes. The main conclusions are that the healthcare professionals, working with the development, implementation and/or use of EPR, are in a very important and difficult process settling up with old traditions and cultures tied to the healthcare professions. Especially the healthcare professionals, working with EPR, shows interest and readiness to participate in new ways of collaboration and to work with highly structured data in structured frameworks. EPR is at this point of time only diffused in few relatively small and isolated healthcare organisations, and the preliminary assessment in the study only outlines the perspectives for what will happen on a wider scale when EPR systems get more diffused.