A portable communicative architecture for electronic healthcare records: the Good European Healthcare Record project...

The European Union is supporting research into medical informatics via its Advanced Informatics in Medicine (AIM) program. One of the current AIM projects is the Good European Healthcare Record (GEHR) project. Its objective is to devise an architecture for electronic healthcare records that will enable them to be comprehensive, communicative, and portable to different systems. The work was funded from January 1992 to December 1994. The project team consisted of over 50 personnel representing clinicians, computer scientists, and computer programmers in eight European countries. The partner organizations are Health Data Management Partners (Belgium), Croix Rouge Francaise (France), France Telecom, Association des Medecins et Medicins Dentistes (Luxembourg), Instituto Clinica Geral Zona Norte (Portugal), Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital (UK), and SmithKline Beecham (UK). The work of the project has been carried out by three subgroups covering clinical, architecture, and systems aspects. One of the strengths of the project has been that most of the work has been done as collaborations between members of different groups. This has meant that there has been very close contact between clinicians and computer experts. The GEHR project is providing important input into the standardization process in Europe via, for example, PT011 of Working Group 1 of CEN TC/251 (the developing standards for the architecture of healthcare records).