Abstract
Denmark is a high-income, progressive country known for its environmental stewardship and digital governance innovations. Less well known is its robust health information exchange (HIE) infrastructure. Rooted in an experiment to connect electronic health record systems in the early 1990s, today the nation boasts a robust, widely adopted platform for digital health. Laboratory, medication, and encounter data are centrally stored and leveraged to facilitate care in hospitals, physician practices, and nursing care facilities. Behind the scenes is an unimposing organization, MedCom, that has facilitated interoperability in Denmark for almost 30 years. This health information organization establishes national standards for data exchange, maintains the core infrastructure that facilitates exchange of clinical messages, and negotiates consensus-based HIE approaches to address health system challenges. In this case study, we examine the critical role MedCom plays in connecting national health IT platforms while describing the widely adopted components of the Danish national HIE infrastructure. We further describe the keys to success for HIE in Denmark, and we describe exciting, innovative HIE projects for the future in this Scandinavian nation.
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