The brag videos of 2020 had the right ambitions but unrealistic goals. The idea of ​​the Health Platform is to realize a public investigation of “One citizen, one record” adopted on November 30, 2012.

Platform is an expression for something as stable and steady as a train platform, but the Health Platform is anything but a stable foundation.

Patients want to eliminate the need to provide the same data when meeting new healthcare workers. If this is to be achieved, the data must have been registered, this is not always possible if the data has been submitted several minutes previously.

Mistakes, extra effort, extra grants, complaints and lack of trust characterize many health professionals’ experiences from the start. Lack of trust is very dangerous. It is impossible to live with the loss of references in the long term. Patients with serious conditions must be able to trust that they will not be forgotten.

There will always be mistakes and shortcomings when starting a new IT system, but they are rarely similar to the experience of using a Health Platform. Less than ten percent of doctors think that the disease will improve after one year of use. Nine out of ten believe that patient safety is at risk. If you don’t involve a doctor, it’s hard to gain trust.

Because there is no careful start-up in smaller hospitals to uncover weaknesses and deficiencies. The largest hospital, St. Olav, selected, with the most complex problems. That is wrong.

Helse Midt-Norge wanted to choose something different from other health regions. The Norwegian alternative was undesirable, and was immediately excluded in the invitation to tender due to international reference requirements. There was a battle between two American offerings: Cerner and Epic. Cerner withdraws, Epic wins.

Whether Epic truly understands what they have to deliver or whether the election committee truly understands the IT challenges in elections and how much extra work there is remains to be seen. Because complaints have never decreased since it was launched on November 12 2022.

There are many appeals against the Health Platform. The costs are soaring. Management has become a challenge with many replacements. In November, Siri Beate Berg was selected to lead construction. An additional NOK 80 million was awarded. They are absolutely necessary to finance the work that a number of IT professionals do with improvements and bug fixes, in the hope of better quality and fewer complaints.

Per Morten Hoff, Norway’s former head of ICT, has written a post about canceling the purchase and applying for compensation for the failed solution. Because we are not talking about millions, but billions of kroner.

The health authorities themselves stopped the Axon project, which was supposed to realize a solution for the city’s health services. Similar solutions should be part of the Health Platform.

Epic has good references from the US. About 80 percent of all patients in the US are treated by the system. In Europe the situation is worse. There are weaknesses in the solutions for Denmark, Finland and the UK.

The question is why? One answer is that health cultures are very different. Epic is optimized to be the basis for hospital reimbursement by insurance companies to cure their patients.

The question is whether the recording of patient data in the Health Platform corresponds to what data is required in Norway’s medical record dream? Data structures don’t seem to be a topic. Archiving structure doesn’t seem to be a topic when choosing Epic.

Because Epic has to manage data from contract specialists, general practitioners, municipalities and hospitals. The question is whether this requires a new data structure or whether the patient record should be expanded with additional data fields.

One of the challenges is that Epic is old-fashioned and pure retirement style. This computer technology is based on MUMPS, a development technology that originated at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1967. This language is combined with an archive system that Epic calls Chronicles.

The language of development is characterized by 60s technology, where computer memory and permanent storage were very expensive. Therefore, few professionals were able to carry out new developments directly, even though computer technology had been standardized until 1995.

Epic took the technology and began exploiting it. Additional development for the Health Platform should be done directly through MUMPS or M, the preferred designation by professionals. Alternatives are add-ons to other development and data exchange tools.

The health sector is struggling. The allocation is too small. The hope is more efficient. This requires new medical technologies, good health systems, and user-friendly operations. Health platforms absorb the need for resources, both financial and human resources, with very uncertain completion dates.

The only realistic thing is that Helse Midt-Norge realizes that the Health Platform is approaching the Bravo Platform in its ability to do a good job. The Bravo platform is upside down. Health platforms must be phased out before they end up overturned.

Helse Midt-Norge had to start again. In this regard, Norway’s health culture is very important. This must be started with caution. While not everyone likes DIPS, Norway’s patient recording solution has been improved over the years and is used in Norwegian hospitals.

Following the acquisition of Kernel, which also owns Aidn’s medical records solution, the development of the next generation of the Norwegian health system is possible. The reason is, Kernel has access to capital. It requires a step-by-step introduction. In this connection, service design becomes an important keyword. Dips Arena is not very popular and needs improvement.

Ease of use and data registration as simple as possible are needed to achieve quality and efficiency. It can’t steal too much time from employees. As with the Health Platform, efficiency is not a priority. America’s major hospital, Kaiser Permanente, has documented a loss of efficiency.

For total efficiency in use, healthcare professionals must feel that their healthcare system is contributing. Employees who only handle data registration are too expensive and do not meet the overall requirements of the authorities. This is the state of the Health Platform, it is on a soot heap and must die if no one can guarantee a miracle.

The IT professionals who have been involved in the development of the Health Platform are an absolutely necessary resource in a service necessary to achieve the next generation of health systems. The Norwegian health system of the future must be open to interaction with new intelligent solutions such as emergency services, where quality-assured data contributes to efficiency.