Organizing for a National Infrastructure Project: The Case of the Finnish Electronic Prescription

Electronic prescriptions should be a central part of a working health care and national e-government infrastructure. In Finland the pursuit to establish such a system has been up few times, and the most recent, nation-wide initiative to set up a central electronic prescription system was set up in 2001. Our article here describes the starting points of the Finnish initiative to set up the system for electronic prescriptions, and presents the organizational structure and main tasks that are set up to build the system. Our theoretical discussion focuses on the concept of national IT infrastructures, and analyses the Finnish electronic prescription system against the ramifications given for a national infrastructure. The authors of the article are members of a group assigned to evaluate the national project. It is worth noting that both the system and the evaluation tasks are at the very early stages of work.