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Digitization is increasingly covering more and more sectors, including medicine. To ensure medical operation 365 × 24 hours, progressively more human and financial resources are necessary. The transformation of patient histories from paper into electronic patient records focused initially on documentation. Today, hospital information systems are increasingly used as a platform for the communication of all professionals involved in the patient process - in Switzerland, however, so far without providing patients direct access to their data. Digititizing processes intend to increase efficiency, but also to enhance clinical and administrative decision support and quality assurance. The introduction of the electronic patient record in Switzerland in 2020 is expected to provide cross-company, more complete documentation of patient care. Multimorbid patients, often treated in different institutions and by different specialists, should benefit from this in particular. Advances in artificial intelligence offer new opportunities in medicine. Challenges include ensuring reliable data protection, and better interoperability of the systems involved. Semantically structured, machine-readable data exchange is a necessity for both networked services and internationally competitive research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electronic health record (EHR) is a topic of high political relevancy particularly with regards to the launch of the ‘electronic patient's dossier' 2017. To investigate the current use of EHR under Swiss general practitioners, we analyzed data from the Work Force Study 2015 with respect to use of electronic, paper and mixed (electronic as well as paper) medical history patient administration. 39% of the participants used EHR, 34% paper and 27% mixed health records. The use of EHR was significantly larger in German-speaking Switzerland (44% ) as compared with French (30% ) and Italian speaking parts (12% ). Especially younger physicians and group practices preferred EHR. EHR users reported a higher number of hours spent for research and further training. The results are discussed with respect to the challenges on general practitioners' provision posed by the demographic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent data on the use of electronic medical records (EMR) in Swiss practices are from 2007. Since then, software products have evolved, The aim of our article is to update the knowledge about the current status of EMR implementation in Swiss practices and to gain information about Swiss primary healthcare providers' views of software tools providing clinical decision support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]