FIRE = Family Medicine ICPC Research using Electronic Medical Record

Project approach:

In the offices of the participating general practitioners, all consultations should be registered according to ICPC-2. Only colleagues using an electronic medical record (EMR) may participate. The data from these offices are being anonymized and uploaded to a central server to be used for analysis (similar to the billing data of the 'Praxisspiegel'). The pilot project has been running since January 2009.

16 general practitioners have been coding since January 2009

One of the fundamentals of information technology is 'garbage in – garbage out': data analysis can only be done with the same quality the data is being registered. - This is why the recruitment and training of project participants takes great care.

Every change in a practice has its own learning curve, including ICPC-2 registration.

Initially a complete code registration takes 1-2 minutes. Once the system and the understanding of it have been optimized, an extra effort of 15-20 seconds can mirror all the problems of a consultation.