Professor Mary Horgan:

The first thing I do when I see a patient on a ward round is to review their drug list to determine what he or she is on and the reasons for it. We try to incorporate this practice into our training. In 1995, when I was training in the US, I led the roll-out of a pilot on electronic medical records in a large institution. I work in a system here within a hospital where there are no electronic medical records other than discharge summaries and these are not available to everybody. Some 23 years on, I do not think we are hugely further along. If we cannot do everything together, why can we not do it piecemeal? Perhaps the patient journey from prevention to general practice to hospital care and back to general practice is the priority that e-health needs to be working on.