The Norwegian National Summary Care Record: a qualitative analysis of doctors’ use of and trust in shared patient information

BACKGROUND: This paper explores Norwegian doctors’ use of and experiences with a national tool for sharing core patient health information. The summary care record (SCR; the Kjernejournal in Norwegian) is the first national system for sharing patient information among the various levels and institutions of health care throughout the country. The health authorities have invested heavily in the development, implementation and deployment of this tool, and as of 2017 all Norwegian citizens have a personalised SCR. However, as there remains limited knowledge about health professionals’ use of, experiences with and opinions regarding this new tool, the purpose of this study was to explore doctors’ direct SCR experiences. METHODS: We conducted 25 in-depth interviews with 10 doctors from an emergency ward, 5 doctors from an emergency clinic and 10 doctors from 5 general practitioner offices. We then transcribed, thematically coded and analysed the interviews utilising a grounded theory approach. RESULTS: The SCRs contain several features for providing core patient information that is particularly relevant in acute or emergency situations; nonetheless, we found that the doctors generally used only one of the tool’s six functions, namely, the pharmaceutical summary. In addition, they primarily used this summary for a few subgroups of patients, including in the emergency ward for unconscious patients, for elderly patients with multiple prescriptions and for patients with substance abuse conditions. The primary difference of the pharmaceutical summary compared with the other functions of the tool is that patient information is automatically updated from a national pharmaceutical server, while other clinically relevant functions, like the critical information category, require manual updates by the health professionals themselves, thereby potentially causing variations in the accuracy, completeness and trustworthiness of the data. CONCLUSION: Therefore, we can assume that the popularity of the pharmaceutical summary among doctors is based on their preference to place their trust in – and therefore more often utilise – automatically updated information. In addition, the doctors’ lack of trust in manually updated information might have severe implications for the future success of the SCR and for similar digital tools for sharing patient information. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12913-018-3069-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.