The Good Electronic Health Record is a revolutionary new way of structuring, storing and managing patient data so that it can shared and exchanged between different healthcare providers in a safe and secure manner.
The original version of GEHR was developed in Europe nearly a decade ago. However, the revolutionary breakthrough which enables GEHR to be fully implemented and a potential world standard for health records, has been made in Australia over the past three years and Australia now leads the world in open EHR research & development.

Advantages of GEHR over current electronic and paper-based systems

Improves the quality of clinical care, while significantly reducing IT costs of providers
Integrates contributions by all clinicians, including GPs, specialists, hospital staff, allied health workers, pathology and radiology services, as well as patients themselves
Provides a complete picture of a patients health status enabling better care to be delivered
Dramatically reduces the level of data errors compared to paper records and current EHR systems
Gives patients complete control over access and distribution of their health records
Enables health records to be safely and securely communicated between healthcare organizations such as hospitals, GP clinics and community health providers
Is closely linked to Australian and international health informatics standards
Ensures that electronic health records are future proof, interoperable, and automatically processable through the use of a revolutionary new approach called archetypes
Ensures that electronic health record system software and databases no longer have to be continually changed to incorporate new requirements.

GEHR archetypes

Define the structure and business rules of information used in health computing systems, i.e. they define concepts ranging from the simple, such as blood pressure, to the most complex, such as MRI scan results
Are created and modified by clinicians rather than IT specialists
Can be created and modified at any time rather than hard-wired into the software and database as happens in current systems
Contain the validation rules for all data entered into the computing system, therefore surpassing the ability of current systems to prevent errors in health records
Can be defined and shared by health authorities and providers, enabling health record information to be shared between different systems, different types of healthcare professionals and even different countries
Form a basis for intelligent automatic processing, such as decision support as well as epidemiological and other public health research functions
Can be used as a roadmap for data, enabling faster querying
Allow changes to be made to the system without touching the software or database hence eliminating a major cost in all current computer systems
Ensure the system learns over time, increasingly satisfying user needs, rather than degrading into obsolescence, as invariably happens with todays health systems.