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Patient's Medication Information and e-Health Development in Finland: A Case Study of a Finnish Primary Care Organization

Eeva Aarnio, Reetta Raitoharju, Patient's Medication Information and e-Health Development in Finland: A Case Study of a Finnish Primary Care Organization. In: Dan Remenyi (Ed.), Proceedings of ICEG 2008 The International Conference on e-Government, 2008.

Abstract:

In the healthcare sector, the savings achieved with smooth electronic transfer of information are more significant than just financial; patient's lives could be saved. Patient's medication information is often mentioned to be essential for successful treatment decisions and if not available, a possible cause of injuries. In Finland, electronic patient records (EPRs) have already been in use for years in the healthcare sector organizations. Despite that, patient information cannot yet be exchanged between different healthcare organizations. The reasons for that are several but the most significant are legal issues related to patient protection and the incompatibility of the EPRs that have been chosen community-specifically.

In this qualitative study, the current sources of medication information and the fulfillment of mainly non-technical data quality characteristics are studied in a Finnish primary care organization and assessed in the light of future national level e-Health solutions. The study is part of a grant-funded project aiming at supporting national level decision-making related to the management of medication information.

Patient's medication information refers to the information on the current medication regimen, medication history, drug allergies and other patient-specific information. To truly support the decision-making of the clinicians, the medication information should be among other things, accurate, comprehensive and accessible. The future e-Health solutions in Finland include implementation of e-Prescriptions and a database for them, another national centralized archive for patient information and an interface for patients to see their own information. There is also under planning a self-reporting portal for the citizens. The empirical data consists of 10 healthcare professionals' interviews concerning the use of medication information at their clinical work and 5 interviews of experts involved in the national level e-Health development projects. The aim of the paper is to define the healthcare professionals' current sources of information and perceptions on the quality of the used data and to assess what kind of enhancements will be achieved with the future e-Health solutions, and what should be taken into account at this stage of the development.

The interviewed professionals reported that patients' medication information is often dispersed even in the EPR of the organization and that there is no guarantee that the list in the EPR is up-to-date. Therefore patient or a family member is usually the most important source of information. According to the experts, the problems related to the above mentioned issues could be at least partly solved with the help of the e-prescription database (e.g. whether patient has bought the medications). As the patients already have an important role as information sources, increasing their roles' as self-reporters through a portal could be one of the future solutions in decreasing primary care professionals' workload and enhancing the quality, at least the comprehensiveness, of the medication information. Other possibilities are related to the combination of the information from the archives.

BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpAaRa08a,
  title = {Patient's Medication Information and e-Health Development in Finland: A Case Study of a Finnish Primary Care Organization},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of ICEG 2008 The International Conference on e-Government},
  author = {Aarnio, Eeva and Raitoharju, Reetta},
  editor = {Remenyi, Dan},
  year = {2008},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Other

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