title: Bridging information gaps between primary and secondary healthcare.
abstract: Medication errors are harmful and costly for healthcare systems. Recent studies show that a major part of these errors are due to the problems in transferring the patient current medication-data between primary and secondary healthcare. Recent ICT development promises to improve the communication between primary and secondary healthcare. In order to find out the constraints that may hamper a communication project's productivity, an IT configuration for building a medication-data communication network between primary and secondary healthcare in the Netherlands was followed applying qualitative methods. We analysed some important problems that project faced and conclude that problems with the data integration and saving the data integrity are important challenges for the project to maintain its objectives.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Health Policy and Management, Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. h.pirnejad@erasmusmc.nl
authors.forename: Habibollah
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Pirnejad
authors.forename: Arjen P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Stoop
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Berg
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D007256:Information Systems; D008508:Medication Errors / Q000517:prevention & control*; D009426:Netherlands; D011320:Primary Health Care