IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/hepoli/v122y2018i2p69-74.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

E-health in Switzerland: The laborious adoption of the federal law on electronic health records (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) networks

Author

Listed:
  • De Pietro, Carlo
  • Francetic, Igor

Abstract

Within the framework of a broader e-health strategy launched a decade ago, in 2015 Switzerland passed a new federal law on patients’ electronic health records (EHR). The reform requires hospitals to adopt interoperable EHRs to facilitate data sharing and cooperation among healthcare providers, ultimately contributing to improvements in quality of care and efficiency in the health system. Adoption is voluntary for ambulatories and private practices, that may however be pushed towards EHRs by patients. The latter have complete discretion in the choice of the health information to share. Moreover, careful attention is given to data security issues. Despite good intentions, the high institutional and organisational fragmentation of the Swiss healthcare system, as well as the lack of full agreement with stakeholders on some critical points of the reform, slowed the process of adoption of the law. In particular, pilot projects made clear that the participation of ambulatories is doomed to be low unless appropriate incentives are put in place. Moreover, most stakeholders point at the strategy proposed to finance technical implementation and management of EHRs as a major drawback. After two years of intense preparatory work, the law entered into force in April 2017.

Suggested Citation

  • De Pietro, Carlo & Francetic, Igor, 2018. "E-health in Switzerland: The laborious adoption of the federal law on electronic health records (EHR) and health information exchange (HIE) networks," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 122(2), pages 69-74.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:122:y:2018:i:2:p:69-74
    DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2017.11.005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851017303172
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.healthpol.2017.11.005?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ben-Assuli, Ofir, 2015. "Electronic health records, adoption, quality of care, legal and privacy issues and their implementation in emergency departments," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 119(3), pages 287-297.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Segun Akinola & Arnesh Telukdarie, 2023. "Sustainable Digital Transformation in Healthcare: Advancing a Digital Vascular Health Innovation Solution," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(13), pages 1-23, July.
    2. Kovačić Matija & Mutavdžija Maja & Buntak Krešimir, 2022. "e-Health Application, Implementation and Challenges: A Literature Review," Business Systems Research, Sciendo, vol. 13(1), pages 1-18, June.
    3. Lester Darryl Geneviève & Andrea Martani & Maria Christina Mallet & Tenzin Wangmo & Bernice Simone Elger, 2019. "Factors influencing harmonized health data collection, sharing and linkage in Denmark and Switzerland: A systematic review," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(12), pages 1-44, December.
    4. Burnel, Philippe, 2018. "The introduction of electronic medical records in France: More progress during the second attempt," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 122(9), pages 937-940.
    5. Al-Sharhan, Salah & Omran, Esraa & Lari, Kamran, 2019. "An integrated holistic model for an eHealth system: A national implementation approach and a new cloud-based security model," International Journal of Information Management, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 121-130.
    6. Christine Lewis & Patrice Ollivaud, 2020. "Policies for Switzerland’s ageing society," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1600, OECD Publishing.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ardielli Eva, 2020. "Evaluation of eHealth Deployment at Primary Care in the EU Member States by Usage of Selected MCDM Methods," Review of Economic Perspectives, Sciendo, vol. 20(3), pages 337-359, September.
    2. Flaumenhaft, Yakov & Ben-Assuli, Ofir, 2018. "Personal health records, global policy and regulation review," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 122(8), pages 815-826.
    3. Marco Remondino, 2018. "Information Technology in Healthcare: HHC-MOTES, a Novel Set of Metrics to Analyse IT Sustainability in Different Areas," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(8), pages 1-20, August.
    4. Tomás Robles & Borja Bordel & Ramón Alcarria & Diego Sánchez-de-Rivera, 2020. "Enabling trustworthy personal data protection in eHealth and well-being services through privacy-by-design," International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, , vol. 16(5), pages 15501477209, May.
    5. Melchiorre, Maria Gabriella & Papa, Roberta & Rijken, Mieke & van Ginneken, Ewout & Hujala, Anneli & Barbabella, Francesco, 2018. "eHealth in integrated care programs for people with multimorbidity in Europe: Insights from the ICARE4EU project," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 122(1), pages 53-63.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:122:y:2018:i:2:p:69-74. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/healthpol .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.