The Nordic Council of Ministers eHealth group has several subgroups which have different points of focus and mandates regarding common eHealth challenges in Nordic countries.
The Nordic Council of Ministers eHealth Standardization group ‘s focus is on standardization and one of the mandate topics for 2023–2025 is to contribute to and ensure that the Reducing Clinician Burden (RCB) initiative is considered in standardization work in Nordic countries. Another important topic for the Nordic e-health standards group is to share knowledge and best practices in e-health among the Nordic countries, for example around issues like digital health infrastructures in different Nordic countries, quality of data, interoperability at all levels of eHealth services, and to support the work of the professionals through digitalization. The participating organizations from Nordic countries are national competence centres who have also brought insights from their national strategies and initiatives to this work.
Nordic eHealth Research Network (NeRN) is another subgroup under the Nordic Council on Ministers, which pursues and develops common Nordic indicators for eHealth functionalities and services. Furthermore, NeRN applies and evaluates them to produce Nordic eHealth benchmark data for use by national and international policy makers and scientific communities to further support the development of Nordic welfare. The eHealth Standardization group has been consulting the NeRN’s scientific experts regarding the RCB theme in general and has received valuable input to the guideline.
The Nordic healthcare providers faced an unprecedented burden during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Access to care and patient information was more imperative than ever. To achieve better interoperability in the future, the needs for common data content e-Health standards, reference terminologies, data and information models and exchange e-Health standards should be worked with.
There is growing interest in standardization organizations all over the word on the topic of how to reduce healthcare professionals’ documentation burden with the help of e-Health standards. Especially Health Level Seven (HL7) has been working with the RCB theme for several years. The RCB initiative is a formal activity in HL7 in a specific Electronic Health Record Work Group (EHR WG). This is one of the inputs for this document, but other aspects and initiatives have also been considered.
Even though much good work is being done to reduce healthcare professionals’ documentation burden globally, there are also some distinctive features in the Nordic environments that the Nordic e-health standards group has looked at more closely. It is important to ensure that e-Health standards are not the cause of additional burden for health professionals, and that the use of e-Health standards promotes high quality of data for both primary and secondary use. This work is linked to national and international initiatives of the participating Nordic editors and organizations, including European Union Recovery and Resilience Facility.