Dr. Finn Klamer has been the Medical Developmental Advisor to Sundhed.dk, the Danish eHealth Portal since 2001. He is a specialist in general medicine and has many years experience as a GP. Since 1988 he has been deeply involved as a medical advisor for numerous national IT projects, been on a number of boards and national development forums.
He is known as a supporter of more open health services with active participation by patients and exploitation of the IT possibilities in the dialogue with the patient.
We spoke to Dr Klamer about his Keynote address to the CeBIT eHealth conference about “Using the eHealth Portal as a National Distribution Frame and a Platform to Facilitate the Sharing of Knowledge and Patient Data”.
Amongst his responsibilities is being editor of the national handbook for professionals and patients regarding interaction with sundhed.dk – a point related to his keynote message concerning sharing of patients resources and the synergy achieved by using and sharing knowledge in the communication areas and knowledge areas of the eHealth portal.
Dr Klamer said that during his keynote he would illuminate and illustrate the following areas:
“We must in Denmark and other countries consider and exploit the synergy, as in other community contexts in harnessing the Internet’s capabilities both humanity and technology through the use of the new language through the Internet and exploit winning instead of building dams in the global paradigm shift”.
“I will illustrate how we in Denmark have enabled the public eHealth portal in our organisation structure to reflect regional and local ICT development projects and how the success can be achieved by achieving political beliefs and afterward political willingness”.
“During the period since we started we have accumulated experience about how access barriers are overcome both organisationally and in the technical and administrative interaction not at least the big challenges about system interoperability and the organisational acceptance to allow access to data and other related patient information by the responsible authorities nationally and regionally – and this an important issue in my keynote”.
“If we look more specifically, there is the possibility of trans-global exploitation and discussion about our experiences around areas as: Security, privacy, ethical, cultural differences etc. These aspects will be discussed by me in an online demonstration of an actual patient case”.
Dr Klamer said that sharing data amongst different groups is very important and he will describe examples of this between professionals themselves, between professionals and patients, as well as between the patients themselves (patient networks).
He will also explain how knowledge is shared in the Danish ehealth portal in two different languages playing together, the patient’s language as well as professional language, and the data challenges associated with this.
Future Trends
Dr Klamer told us that:
“The recent steps we have taken are very visionary and we currently in a consolidation phase, however in the next phase we see strong challenges concerning our moving from system-oriented to user-oriented presentation of data including user involvement”.
“However they are certainly interested in progressing with integration of the joint health journal in the ehealth portal with common access in the same context to E-records at hospitals, primary care and special practices – The common medication card – The joint national medical profile – The common laboratory profile – The National Patient Index with image access – The common vaccination register – all in the common context and with interplay between data and data related knowledge”.
“Patient empowerment opportunities include questionnaires that link up with general data prior to hospitalization and modules for structured dialogue as well as online patient diaries to be shared with health professionals and the patient’s relatives”.
