Electronic Healthcare Records: an essential part of Health Telematics Applications

A healthcare record should ideally be a repository of data, describing a person's health and how it is being supported; and not, as it is now, describing a person's diseases and treatment only. The healthcare record is the basis for monitoring and decisions. Therefore it should be open and available to all authorized health professionals and to the patient. To make this easier is one of the major advantages of electronic healthcare records (EHCR). The computer-based patient record could make major contributions to improving the healthcare system. This is the motivation to initiatives, projects and routine implementations of electronic patient records. The European Union and national initiatives have put major efforts into the support of this main field of medical information processing.