Are problem-oriented medial records (POMR) suitable for use in GPs daily practice?
Problem-oriented functions have been implemented in almost all Belgian GPs’ software systems since 2003. We therefore investigated whether some of them – especially the explicit linking procedure between treatments or referrals and the relevant problems – can be used by GPs in their current daily practice.In 2005, within the Belgian ResoPrim project, we organized data collection, mainly around the theme of “hypertension and cardiovascular risk factors”, by 26 volunteer GPs’ practices using three different software systems. Data were collected prospectively over six weeks in early 2005, and retrospectively for 2004. In this paper we report only on the part of the study that aimed to assess the linking procedure. For all patients and hypertensive patients alike, the key indicators used were the percentage of (problem-) linked drugs among the drugs extracted, the percentage of anti-hypertensive (problem-) linked drugs among anti-hypertensive drugs extracted, and the percentage of (problem
