If the Danes Can Do It....

From NYT:
"...You see how easy it is for me?” Mr. Danstrup said, sitting at his desk while video chatting with his nurse at Frederiksberg University Hospital, a mile away. “Instead of wasting the day at the hospital?”

He clipped an electronic pulse reader to his finger. It logged his reading and sent it to his doctor. Mr. Danstrup can also look up his personal health record online. His prescriptions are paperless — his doctors enters them electronically, and any pharmacy in the country can pull them up. Any time he wants to get in touch with his primary care doctor, he sends an e-mail message.

All of this is possible because Mr. Danstrup lives in Denmark, a country that began embracing electronic health records and other health care information technology a decade ago. Today, virtually all primary care physicians and nearly half of the hospitals use electronic records, and officials are trying to encourage more “telemedicine” projects like the one started at Frederiksberg by Dr. Klaus Phanareth, a physician there.

Several studies, including one to be published later this month by the Commonwealth Fund, conclude that the Danish information system is the most efficient in the world, saving doctors an average of 50 minutes a day in administrative work. And a 2008 report from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society estimated that electronic record keeping saved Denmark’s health system as much as $120 million a year.

Now policy makers in the United States are studying Denmark’s system to see whether its successes can be replicated as part of the overhaul of the health system making its way through Congress. Dr. David Blumenthal, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who was named by President Obama as national coordinator of health information technology, has said the United States is “well behind” Denmark and its Scandinavian neighbors, Sweden and Norway, in the use of electronic health records.

Denmark’s success has much to do with the its small size, its homogeneous population and its regulated health care system — on all counts, very different from the United States. As in much of Europe, health care in Denmark is financed by taxes, and most services are free.

...Kurt Nielsen, the hospital’s director, says that while the doctors are not particularly adept at information technology, they have gradually embraced it. And it helps that the staff was involved in developing the innovations.

“My staff at the hospital is very, very satisfied,” he said. “We build these systems in an incremental way, and seek their input throughout.”

...Culturally, Danes are also different. Mr. Larsen, of Denmark’s health information agency, says his countrymen have few objections to the national patient registry — perhaps because they have different priorities from Americans when it comes to medical privacy.

“As long you are a healthy man, you fear for your privacy,” he said. “It is when you are sick that you wish people knew what your problem was.” ...”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/health/12denmark.html?scp=1&sq=sindya%20bhanoo&st=cse