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Delivery of a national Electronic Health Record (EHR) has been one of the target goals carried by many countries health management organizations for a number of years now. For a long time they were little more than a pipedream, troubled by complex integration, privacy and security issues.

Today however the story is a little different, many countries EHR programs are thriving and offering significant benefit to both providers and patients.

A working group of The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMMS) have collaborated on a whitepaper that details these efforts in many nations around the world, and it appeared on their web site earlier this week.

From the 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 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.

For ease of storage I have a copy of the whitepaper here, you’ll find the original on the HIMMS site here.