Dutch Electronic Medical Record - Complexity Perspective

Along with the global community, the Dutch health care system is pioneering in transitioning to electronic medical records. Although certain studies have been conducted on the Dutch experience of implementing its national Electronic Medical Record system, a historical account of this decade long initiative is largely lacking. More importantly, the study of specific challenges and the ways they are treated has been largely undermined. This paper summarizes the history and the current state of the Dutch Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. The paper highlights the challenges within this system and analyzes the way to handle these challenges. To this end, this paper finds that while the Dutch government is rapidly implementing the EMR system, there is a plethora of socio-technical challenges still unresolved. To handle them, these social and technical challenges require a holistic approach to complete the EMR implementation and deployment with possibly less resistance and concerns of the stakeholders.