Watch what is evolving in Brazil... It is largely a greenfields nation as far as electronic health records is concerned, which gives it a great opportunity to make bold and innovative decisions, avoiding many of the pitfalls of those who have gone before and the constraints of legacy systems.
The national program has set up CENTERMS - the national centre for Terminology and plans to use the Clinical Knowledge Manager as a key tool to manage the national "infostructure".
You'll notice the phrase is INFOstructure, not infrastructure like most other EHR approaches. Their premise is that standardisation of the information models and terminology value sets will provide a strategic component of the final EHR solution that will outlast any single technology, messaging paradigm or implementation trend, and underpin every eHealth use case, from EHRs to messages, population health queries, research, big data aggregation and knowledge-based decision support.
Last week, Professor Ricardo Puttini, as Brazilian MoH EHR program lead gave a keynote address, including openEHR at the centre of Brazil’s infostructure program, at Australia's healthIT conference, HIC2015.
Next week, at Medinfo, Ricardo Puttini and Dr Jussara Rotsch, plus Australia's Heather Grain and myself will be conducting a workshop to explain the Brazilian approach: "Practical Use of Terminologies with Clinical Information Models workshop" on Saturday August 22 at 11.30 hours, Room 9.
Come say hello if you'll be in Sao Paulo next week!