IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Medical advice via email is increasing, according to the data shown in the report of the IT and Telecom Agency, launched on 20 January 2011. More specifically, in 2006 1.2 % of all medical consultations were made via email, while in 2009 the number had risen to 4.4 %. Statistics for 2010 have not yet been calculated.

It is proved helpful to have doctor's assessment, without having to move to a clinic for issues such as inflamed sinuses or high temperature.

Sundhed.dk achieved a record for site traffic in January 2011, during which over 333 000 different users visited the portal and altogether viewed almost 3.4 million pages. January is traditionally a month when many are seeking health information in connection with New Year resolutions. In 2011, however, the service which was of particular public interest was e-journal: more than 173.000 users sought information about it, and there were 70.000 e-journal views during the month.

The Patient's Handbook has more than 3 000 articles, written by more than 50 specialists and practicing doctors, and divided into disease articles, symptoms articles and studies. It is illustrated with over 2 000 medical drawings, x-ray images, animations and photographs, and is free of advertising and commercial interests. The handbook has been produced by a collaboration of Danish Regions (Danske Regioner, in Danish), the official Danish eHealth portal sundhed.dk and the Danish Medical Association (Lægeforeningen, in Danish). This is the first time that the public health system has launched an online handbook of this kind.

The project starts at the beginning of 2012 and runs for two years. Four hospitals in the Capital Region (Region Hovedstaden, in Danish) and the Central Denmark Region (Region Midtjylland, in Danish) are participating in the project with up to ten municipalities and a number of practitioners across the country. It will produce a database that records information on patients while they remain at home. Health professionals in all sectors will have access to patient data from their own computer and can quickly decide whether there is a need to adjust the patient's medication. The patients represent five different groups: COPD (emphysema), diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases and pregnant women with and without complications.

As part of its accession to the OGP, Denmark developed a one-year action plan for open government activities. The action plan, presented at an ‘Open Government Partnership High Level Meeting’, in Brazil, on 17-18 April 2012, is based on inputs from a broad consultation process, in which citizens, companies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and public authorities were invited to propose initiatives and activities. The Danish Agency for Digitisation is responsible for the overall coordination of the Danish work with OGP.

Public administrations on Denmark are required to be able to accept both the Open Document Format (ODF) and a private IT vendor's alternative OOXML. "I don't know how other public administrations in Denmark handle this requirement, but for our department it is the reason to switch to LibreOffice." says the responsible executive secretary of the Department in question Thomas Ginnerup-Nielsen.

The new strategy, called 'The digital road to future prosperity', aims to phase out paper-based forms and postage. So citizens will use the Internet for all applications and notifications to the public sector, such as when they move, when they enrol a child in a nursery or when they order a new passport. In addition, all citizens and businesses will automatically be given a free digital mailbox to which all communications from the public sector will be sent. By 2015, therefore, interactions of citizens and businesses with the public sector will be entirely paperless.

The Patient's Handbook has more than 3000 articles written by more than 50 specialists and general practitioners, and is completely free of advertisements and commercial interests. It also contains about 2000 illustrations in the form of medical drawings, radiographs, animations and photographs concerning health and disease issues.

This is the conclusion of a meeting between Danish Science Minister Ms. Charlotte Sahl-Madsen and the Danish Parliament's spokesperson for IT on 30 March 2011.

Public authorities will remain committed to receiving documents from citizens and businesses in all popular formats (including Open Document Format [ODF] and Open Office XML [OOXML]). Likewise, the public bodies will continue to send documents to citizens and businesses in PDF/A-1 format.

The new service is called 'My consultations' (Mine konsultationer, in Danish) and it was launched by Danish Regions. It covers those visits since 2003 for which the Danish Government has granted full or partial reimbursement. The information comes from the Health Insurance Register, which contains the information that care providers report to Danish Regions.

The new NemLog-in is an updated version of the previous one that handled more than 31 million login requests from citizens in 2012. This corresponds to an average of one login every second of every day. Currently, about 130 citizen-oriented public services use the NemLog-in solution. NemLog-in acts as a secure single sign-on solution that gives citizens access to all public services with one login without the citizen having to log in again. Almost all public services were simultaneously linked to the new NemLog-in thanks to the efforts of the public authorities and their IT supplier.

The Digitisation Board will combine the expertise of the previous IT and Telecom Agency and that of the Finance department in order to strengthen the digitisation of the public sector. This Board will be in charge of ensuring that digitisation strategies are implemented to the benefit of citizens and that new digital opportunities are fully exploited.

Sundhed.dk has evolved continuously since its launch in December 2003, including the comprehensive technical upgrade of 2009. It now has thousands of articles and many options with comprehensive data, and the quality of its information has over the past eight years led to many loyal users. However, the presentation and structure had remained much the same since the portal's launch, with some users finding it messy, boring and hard to navigate.

Paperless prescriptions, online access to medical records and video chats with your doc are just a few features of the Danish healthcare system. Although not everyone has jumped on the digital bandwagon yet, about half of the country’s hospitals and nearly all primary care doctors have opted for electronic records.

This agenda is laid down in the Commission Communication of 7 September 2007 entitled 'e-Skills for the 21st Century: Fostering Competitiveness, Growth and Jobs'; it included five major action lines at EU level for the 2008-2010 period.

In the course of the last three years, the effects of the implementation have been followed closely and studied by researchers from Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University who continuously have provided feedback to the Faroese. The researchers characterise the system, and not least the implementation, as a success and believe that Denmark can learn from the Faroese project, just as the Faroese have made great use of the Danish experience with the implementation of EHR in their process.

The report noted that Denmark’s level of network readiness had to do with an excellent regulatory environment, in addition to clear government leadership and vision in leveraging ICT for growth and promoting ICT penetration and usage.