Dear Colleagues,

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a key aspect of modern healthcare. They can make patients’ data available for different parties within the treatment chain almost in real time and thus improve the continuation of care. EHRs can also improve patients’ safety if various safety checks are included in the EHR system. In sophisticated EHR systems, it is possible to supervise the quality of care. Structural recordings in EHRs will help to gather data regarding patients and treatment results, thus enabling the data-driven management of healthcare units. This has the potential to improve both the efficacy and effectiveness of the treatment. However, EHR systems also have their caveats. The systems are often complex and expensive. The optimal use of EHRs requires the extensive education of the staff. Furthermore, a dependency on EHRs will cause new types of safety issues, because their availability has to be over 99.9% in practice, and any unplanned disruptions will cause major risks in terms of patient safety. The opportunity for multiple actors to access the EHR system creates also issues regarding the confidentiality of data and the privacy of patients, and sometimes, quite complex solutions are needed to secure patients’ rights to privacy. However, EHRs are here to stay. It is likely that in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) will be a part of EHR systems, helping professionals to select those at-risk patients for appropriate treatment and guide others to enable better outcomes.

Prof. Dr. Lasse Lehtonen
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
• continuation of care
• patients’ safety
• data-driven management
• effectiveness of the treatment
• privacy