One thing that's quite improved it in Denmark is that a company came out with a whitelabel hosted-health-portal SaaS product (http://www.mithelbred.dk/) that has really caught on. Doctors can sign up with it and reskin it on their clinic's website, and the product handles the backend interaction. You can book appointments, cancel or move them, send/receive notes to the doctor (if you have a question/worry but aren't sure you really need to go in person), check and renew prescriptions, etc. There are even mobile apps! They claim to have >50% of all doctors in the country signed up with them. I think it's caught on to such an extent because from the doctor's perspective it lets them outsource the patient-management / administrative part of their clinic's work for a price that's lower than it'd cost to do in-house, and the fact that patients now get some online convenience is just an added bonus.
Not entirely related, but UK's NHS holds a crown for (probably) biggest IT project failure ever. It took 11 years and £9.8b to reinvent patient record system.
At least they can finally sell the patient history to third parties.
"At least they can finally sell the patient history to third parties"
Not sure your sarcasm is all that clear. To those not aware the UK government is passing this off as a way to improve your care within the NHS via centralised records. They have made it opt-out and have sent out a confusing leaflet that leads the reader to believe their care will suffer if they opt-out of selling patient records.
Records are already centralised within the NHS. What is happening is the government is setting up a free for all with easily de-anonymised records being sold off to third parties (read: private health providers and insurance companies).
