Click here to download the checklist for EMR decision

In eye care, digital diagnosis and therapy systems play an important role. More than 400 different types of equipments with digital output are registered and more than 980,000 systems and instruments are installed worldwide. These devices range from autorefractors to highly sophisticated laser diagnostic devices (RT, OCT etc.). To connect these instruments with innovative electronic medical records (EMR), open standards are required.

With IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) a platform for evaluating standards (like HL7 and DICOM) has been established.

The experience with EMR systems did show that within the first 3 years approx. a third (36%) of the ophthalmologists had to change their system (e.g. vendor went out of business, user was unhappy with the SW etc.). To guarantee the future use of the patient data base an open standard was develeoped which allows the data export to another system independent from the vendor. The CDE-EC (Clinical Data Exchange-Eye Care) is based on the official German HIT standard (BDT-A).
International and eye care specialized vendors provide interfaces according to the standard free of charge: view standard

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the standard for image management in healthcare environments. The standard is also supported by the eye care community. Within the DICOM community, ophthalmology is represented by the dedicated Workgroup WG 9 (for more information please visit the AAO website).