Modelling and implementing Electronic Health Records in Denmark

The Danish Health IT strategy [1] points out that integration between electronic health records (EHR) systems has a high priority. A prerequisite for real integration and semantic interoperability is agreement of the data content and the information models. The National Board of Health is working on a common model for EHR, but it is not yet fully developed. At the same time several development and implementation projects are taking place at a regional level. These EHRs are built on information models from different vendors and are based on different integration platforms. The Danish EHR observatory, which has been monitoring the development of EHRs in Denmark since 1998, have analysed the challenges of using different information models and integration platforms. This paper also reports new tendencies in modelling and integration platforms globally and how this is reflected in the National development.