Carelink

Connecting Health Care

Many good IT-supports have been developed within the healthcare area. Now, it is time for them to understand each other.

It is understood: Patient data should need to be registered only once! Information should be accessible easily and securely – regardless of time and place. Patients, as well as care providers, should be able to influence and to follow up on the interventions.

A majority of the Swedish population – fifty-two percent – do believe that doctors have access to journals over their earlier medical history. Fifty-seven percent believe that doctors have access to information, regarding pharmaceuticals prescribed to a person. People aged between 16 and 29 years more often than others – sixty-eight percent - believe that doctors have access to information of earlier prescriptions.

This is the result of a field survey about secure healthcare information, made in May 2006. On behalf of Carelink, Synovate Temo interviewed a thousand Swedish citizens, aged from sixteen and older. Eighty-four percent of those interviewed had been given professional care in a hospital or in a district health care centre, themselves, or their next of kin, during the previous two years.

Furthermore, nine out of ten people believe that doctors at hospitals should have access to information about their earlier history of care. As well as to information regarding pharmaceuticals that recently have been prescribed to them by other doctors, and to information that patients have given earlier on to other doctors within the health services.

Nine out of ten people also think that the present system for information-handling is bad. Sadly enough, they are right in this matter: Every day large amounts of patient-information are double administrated. Unnecessary examinations are carried out, and unnecessary pharmaceuticals are prescribed. This is not a matter of costs alone; due to the matter that the right information – which most commonly is stored in a computer-system somewhere - is not available at the critical moment, people become maltreated. Hereby, many patients are injured – and fatal causalities are not unusual. In fact, international comparisons show that there are reasons to fear that defects in care cause more fatal causalities than traffic do.

Many county councils/regions do work to solve these matters, and measures are often in place at the local level. Although - before health services can live up to what people are demanding, these efforts must be linked in a much broader perspective. And this is where Carelink steps in: as a body for national co-operation. Ours is the role to cope with the challenge of co-operation between relatively independent counties and local authorities, in enabling development in the Swedish care and healthcare sector. This we are doing by initiating, managing, developing and administrating national IT solutions. Several projects that run through Carelink aim at the developing of common services and applications for healthcare providers.