EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
"Healthcare information technology (IT) is a sleeping giant. Although healthcare budgets
contribute to the bulk of worldwide industrialized government spending, healthcare IT
lags far behind the technological capabilities of other global businesses including
banking, telecommunications and the media.
"The HIMSS Global Enterprise Task Force (GETF) was asked to investigate efforts to
implement the electronic health record (EHR) in a host of countries around the world.
GETF looked at a battery of electronic health record (EHR) components within each
country, including security, quality, financing sources and barriers to adoption. Four
common threads that affect EHR implementation and produce a kinship between every
effort around the globe were identified:
- Funding
- Governance
- Standardization and interoperability
- Communication.
"Local and nationwide efforts to realize EHR systems were intermittently reported in all
the countries we studied. When analyzing these efforts, the common threads listed above
helped to explain the success, barriers or implementation failures experienced in each
country.
"The need for this analysis is readily apparent. It allows us to harness the strength of the
information and then deploy it to key decision makers in any of the countries studied to
help in their efforts to build a successful EHR system. The information gathered here
over many months from some of each country’s leading experts can be used to predict the
future success of efforts in the U.S. to embed IT into the world of healthcare, whether
these efforts are local, regional, national or globally implemented.
"In the final analysis, we explain how the U.S. lags can benefit in the implementation of
standardized and interoperable EHRs, and how we can avoid some of the mistakes while
capitalizing on the successes of other countries’ efforts.
"As shown in the following chapters on each country studied, we focused on each nation’s
overall healthcare system, their IT status and strategies, national or regional approaches,
connectivity issues, standards and stages of implementation. We also reviewed the
critical factors of governance, funding, public policy, and legal and regulatory issues that
affect the success of EHR adoption in each of these countries. As expected, these are all
key indicators that determine where the U.S. stands in comparison with other countries."
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Electronic Health Records: A Global Perspective White Paper [HIMSS]