Patient related care information is important over long periods of time.
Thus it cannot be stored in running systems handling day by day information exchange. In the future, when the demands arise to use patient related information, neither the programmes nor the databases, in which the information once was fed, will be available. These facts imply that electronically stored patient related information must be electronically accessible and searchable and thus the information must be stored in a time-invariant way. In future use of patient related information it is of extraordinary importance both nationally, in the EU and internationally to use a standardised way to handle and access archived patient related information. Already in 1995 the search for a solution of these issues was initialised at the Health Informatics Department at Spri- the Swedish National Institute for Health Services Development.