Israeli Medical Records Placed On-Line to Promote Research

Electronic medical records are being viewed in some smaller countries like Iceland as a national asset. They are viewed as a means to improve population health and also to stimulate research in the country and elsewhere. Iceland has been pursuing such a strategy for years (see:Centralized Health Databases: Lessons from Iceland; Iceland ’s Research Resources: The Health Sector Database, Genealogy Databases, and Biobanks; PDF) and Israel now seems to be pursuing a similar goal (see:Israelis' medical records to be put online for research):The Israeli Cabinet...[recently] passed a decision launching the"National Digital Health Plan." Approximately...$286,490,000) has been budgeted for the plan which includes technological development, international cooperation, concentrated academic and industrial efforts and regulatory changes to encourage data research...."Israel has a gigantic database that embraces almost the entire population, a large population relative to – let's say – the Baltic countries, one of which has one million people in this database; we have almost nine million people. This is a focused database of the health records of almost each and every one of us over the last two decades," Netanyahu said."This is a great asset and we want to make it available to researchers, developers and companies in order to receive two things: Preventive medicine and personal medicine, personally calibrated for each person." Netanyahu al...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Clinical Lab Industry News Electronic Health Record (EHR) Genomic Testing Healthcare Business Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Lab Information Medical Research Public Health Source Type: blogs