Sweden to go-live with online records

Sweden will provide patients with online access to their electronic medical records before the end of the year, the deputy director of the healthcare division of Sweden’s Ministry of Health and Social Affairs has confirmed.

Speaking at eHealth Insider Live 2010, Daniel Forslund said that the records would be accessed through a new website and technology platform based on the country’s 1177 service, which already provides patients with health advice.

Forslund told E-Health Europe after his presentation: “It has taken a while to launch the service and to get the security right. But by the end of December, we will provide patients in two large municipalities with access to their records online.”

The service has already been trialled in a much smaller pilot in both of the regions. It will now be scaled up to provide full text records to patients. These will still be held on a regional basis.

Patients will only be able to access their records when they sign a form giving explicit consent, and will need to use an additional ID solution of their choice, such as a smartcard or a bank card.

The patients will not be able to amend or edit any of their medical information but Forslund says that there will be scope to do that in the future.

He added: “At the moment the record will be read-only, but the next phase will be more about storing and sharing data with healthcare providers.

"You can basically do that today, but this will be in a much more structured way for healthcare professionals, for example allowing patient to enter information about how they are responding to treatment.

Forslund said that by the end of next year he expected more than half of the regions to be providing online access to their patients.

In addition, Forslund told EHE that roll out of Sweden’s National Patient Overview, which provides an electronic summary of patient record will be resumed next week following concerns about the amount of information patients are receiving about the project.

He said: “There was a lot of criticism from the National Data Protection Agency about how information would be used and how it would be made available.

"There were also some issues around restricting access by healthcare professionals, for example a person working in elderly care being able to look at an infant’s record.”

The information campaign has now been relaunched and access restrictions have been put in place in the areas where the records are live and roll-out will resume in the other regions imminently.