Responsibility for a defined population will be an incentive to record diagnoses, risk factors, blood pressure readings, long-term treatment plans, etc. Shared care Shared care using telemedicine will become important where distances are long. There will be shared follow-up registers on certain patient groups with chronic conditions. More information, but probably fewer patients, will be assessed by sub-specialists.
Quality assurance is an essential part of the follow-up registers.
An evaluation project is assessing whether the guidelines influence practice and outcomes. The existence of mainframe systems has slowed the spread of microcomputers, but software solutions will now allow their use. There is a large number of software products for primary care. Lack of standardisation of the electronic patient record, electronic prescriptions and communication between competing electronic database systems is still a problem in the implementation of health care computing. However, a national, freely updated register of all drugs on the national market will be freely available to software developers.