Extensive registration is carried out within Icelandic healthcare and is a part of the regular practice of many healthcare professions. Information is recorded on healthcare service utilization, health problems, and solutions, e.g. prescriptions, surgery, etc.
Information is recorded in medical records, a collection of medical data on an individual's health generated by their contact with the healthcare system.
Part of this data, e.g. diagnosis, is recorded in a standardized manner according to coded classification systems.
The purpose of registration in health services is multifaceted. Registration benefits the health service users, healthcare practitioners, healthcare institutions, and health authorities.
One of the Directorate of Health's primary functions is to collect health data to acquire knowledge on the health services and the population's health status, monitor the services, ensure its quality, and evaluate its effectiveness.
Data collection and analysis are the basis for the supervision and advisory role of the Directorate of Health. In addition, the office's data collection and analysis is an essential prerequisite for policy-making and planning.
Iceland's participation in foreign cooperation also imposes obligations on the office regarding registration, analysis, and health data collection. Partners are required to provide data in international databases, such as WHO, NOMESCO, EUROSTAT, and OECD databases. Part of foreign cooperation is about harmonising the member states' data to make a comparison between countries more reliable.
The Directorate of Health's data collection is based on the regular registration of healthcare practitioners. Consistency is essential for the registration to be effective. For this purpose, the Directorate of Health issues instructions to healthcare institutions, healthcare professionals, and others who provide healthcare services regarding the minimum recording of information.
The instructions for minimum recording emphasizes the multiple uses of information and that coded classification systems are used.
The Directorate of Health keeps track of data collected in its health registers, which facilitates analysis and, thus, an overview of the activities of the institutions and the health services.
The health registers are the basis for monitoring the frequency of different diseases and solutions, as well as the basis for monitoring the effectiveness and quality of health services. This increased use of regular registration increases the data value in the registers.
