Preparing the electronic patient record for collaborative environments and ehealth

In the era of eHealth the electronic patient record is increasingly regarded as part of a collaborative environment. To efficiently support the documentary tasks and analyses a cooperative documentation infrastructure which allows multiple use and shared entry of data is necessary. The objective of this paper is to introduce a method for systematically planning such a cooperative documentation environment. It consists of the steps: analyse the prevailing documentation infrastructure, provide terminology, provide documentation management, plan the logical architecture and provide all necessary tools. The steps can be formally specified so that parameters can be automatically controlled and the environment can be updated more easily.