New Zealand may have worked out the best way to establish an electronic medical record that is useful for clinicians,beginning with the development of a regional clinical data repository (CDR) to provide easy access to laboratory results for hospital clinicians over a decade ago¹.

Before the appearance of enterprise-wide EMR vendors on the scene, New Zealand embraced a realistic attitude to implementing an electronic system for sharing patient records. Auckland health services were the pioneers, establishing an incremental, solution based approach to IT adoption among the clinician base, using Sysmex’s Eclair CDR. Today the northern region has achieved a regionally shared electronic patient record used by over 3000 clinicians daily, and containing over 3 million patient records.The use of standards has contributed to the success of the comprehensive patient record – HL7, LOINC and a national health identifier system. There is a strong collaborative environment amongst health services and vendors, which has led to the achievement of a high degree of interoperability across essential clinical IT systems. The system now integrates over 80 different sources of diagnostic data, building a complete clinical picture stored patient-centrically. Clinicians have secure access to a range of information, regardless of whether the data was collected in hospital or in the community. The response from clinicians has been overwhelmingly positive. A simple, but effective, consent model has been put in place to guard patients’ confidentiality rights.