Experience of connecting a nursing home to GP and hospital by using electronic communication in a dedicated network

This project started in February 2003, and is initiated on basis of a national strategy- plan for introducing the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in the healthcare sector in Norway. The plan is called "Si @" The project is an cooperation between Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine, University Hospital of North Norway and Kroken Sykehjem in Tromsø municipality. It is also based on the fact that the part of the healthcare system who take into care elderly people, traditionally don't have access to ICT- solutions. This part of the healthcare system is often organised by the municipality, while the GPs are independent and the hospitals are own by the state. Such different way of organising the healthcare service demands different solutions for communication between the sections. The purpose of this project is divided into four parts:

• To establish and try out an electronic communication between a nursing home and a GP.

• To establish and try out an electronic communication between a nursing home an a hospital

• To establish a kind of policlinic for professional assessment of sores and ulcers.

• To design a model for implementation of this kind of ICT solutions in the municipal part of the healthcare system.

The project time is planed to be one year, and during this period we will consider to escalate the project by also introducing the same solutions into the homecare service in the municipality next year. We anticipate to meat a lot of challenges in the process, both expected and unexpected, and we want to present some of them on this conference. To what extent we have achieved specific results within September is too early to say, but if it is so, we would like to present them to.