Electronic Health Documentation

The working conference with international participation Electronic Health Documentation took place on October 24^th 2000 in the Medical House. The conference was organized by the Czech Medical Association of J. E. Purkyne and Society of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics in cooperation with the Department of Computer Science of Ministry of Health of CR, with the European Centre for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology – Cardio and with the Czech Society for Cybernetics and Informatics.

The topic of the conference and its programme arose big interest in participation not only of physicians, leading workers and other medical workers but also of other computer specialists and scientific-research workers. The interest in participation was so high that it exceeded the capacity of the auditorium so not all concerned people could participate. It is pity that participation of physicians could not be evaluated by points of the Czech Medical Chamber because executives of the Czech Medical Chamber in Prague 2 on its legit sitting on October 5th 2000 decided, that “this is not professional education of physicians”. With development of information technologies there are rapid changes that can influence both health care and professional medical education. The new European initiative e-Europe wants Europe to use all its potential and to overcome obstacles preventing it from using digital technologies. The report from the conference shown that the Czech Republic made first steps in legislation towards creating conditions for using electronic health documentation. This is the base for other further health services, which are mostly based on telemedicine applications. The conference contributed positively to propagation of new pieces of knowledge about electronic health documentation. There were not only Czech lecturers but also a lecture of prof. Zywietz from German Hannover who spoke about results and experience gained during development of electronic health record within European project I4C. Full texts of reviewed contributions from the conference were published in the journal Physician and Technology in 2001.